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M.a.t (Boil tender a white-fish)
Boil tender a white-fish or trout; chop fine; add same quantity chopped celery, cabbage or lettuce; season same as chicken salad.
A two-line fish salad that assumes you already know the chicken salad recipe printed a few pages earlier. The proportions are the whole method: equal parts flaked fish and crisp vegetable, bound with a mayonnaise or boiled dressing.
- The hinge: cool the fish before dressing itWarm fish will thin mayonnaise and turn the salad greasy. Poach, drain well, cool to room temperature or colder, then flake and combine.
- "Boil tender" means poach"Boil tender" -- a hard rolling boil will break whitefish and trout up; period 'boiling' of delicate fish was often closer to what we would call a gentle simmer. Keep the liquid barely moving and cook until the flesh just separates from the bone; the usual modern guide of roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness is a reasonable check.
- "Season same as chicken salad"A cross-reference to the chicken salad recipe elsewhere in the book, which will supply the dressing. Period chicken salad dressings of this type are generally built on hard-boiled egg yolk, mustard, salt, vinegar and oil or cream, or on plain mayonnaise; check the book's own version. Any modern mayonnaise-based chicken salad dressing stands in directly.
- WhitefishGreat Lakes whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) was cheap and widely available in the 19th-century Midwest and is a specialty item in much of the country now. Any firm, mild, fairly fatty fish works: lake trout, char, unsmoked salmon, or even good tinned salmon.
- Chop fine, but not to pasteThe recipe says chop fine, which in practice gives a finer texture than a modern flaked salad. Flaking the fish and dicing the celery small gets you there without the mortar effect.
- Cabbage or lettuceLettuce will weep once dressed, so use it only if serving immediately. Celery or finely shredded cabbage both hold up and are the better choice for anything made ahead.
- YieldA pound of cooked fish with a pound of chopped celery and about three-quarters of a cup of dressing serves six as a first course or four as a lunch.
- KeepingDressed fish salad is a same-day dish. Refrigerate covered and eat within 24 hours.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the wave of compiled, subscription-funded charity cookbooks that followed the Civil War, and its fish chapters reflect a Great Lakes larder: whitefish and lake trout were abundant, iced, and shipped by rail to Chicago and Toronto markets in quantity. Salads of this kind, cooked protein chopped fine, cut with an equal bulk of celery or cabbage, and bound with a mayonnaise or cooked dressing, were a standard way of stretching leftover fish or fowl into a cold supper dish, and such recipes were sometimes written as cross-references rather than in full, apparently on the assumption that the chicken salad dressing was the household's known quantity.