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Salade Orpheline
Skin, bone and cut six good-sized sardines into quarter-inch pieces, place in a bowl, adding six cold, hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters, one good-sized peeled apple cored and cut in thin slices, and three peeled, boiled potatoes cut into thin slices. Season with four tablespoons salad dressing adding half a teaspoon freshly chopped chives. Mix all well, and serve.
A cold composed salad of the herring-salad family, built on tinned sardines, eggs, potato and apple. The whole thing hinges on how the potatoes are handled and on what you understand "salad dressing" to mean.
- "Salad dressing" means mayonnaiseIn a book of this period the phrase almost always indicates a mayonnaise or a cooked (boiled) dressing thickened with egg and flour, not the sweet bottled product sold under that name now. Four tablespoons is a light coating; taste and add more, since tinned fish and potato both absorb a great deal.
- Skinning and boningThe instruction assumes sardines packed whole with skin and backbone intact. Most tins sold today are already skinless and boneless, so you can go straight to cutting them into quarter-inch pieces. Drain them well on paper first or the oil will thin the dressing.
- Choose the right potatoUse a waxy potato — new, fingerling or Yukon Gold — boiled in its skin, then peeled and sliced. A floury baking potato will break into paste as soon as you mix the salad.
- Dress the potato while warmSlice the potatoes and toss them with a spoonful of the dressing, or a little vinegar, while still warm. Cold potato takes on almost no seasoning, and this is where an otherwise well-made version of the salad tastes flat.
- The appleA firm, tart apple does the work here — Granny Smith, Braeburn, a good russet. Slice it last and turn it in a little lemon juice so it does not brown while you assemble the rest.
- Fold, do not stirSix quartered eggs, sliced potato and sliced apple will not survive vigorous mixing. Combine with a rubber spatula in a wide bowl, lifting from the bottom, so the pieces stay recognisable.
- Season beyond the chivesThe original gives only chives. Salt, black pepper and a squeeze of lemon are needed; capers, a little chopped parsley or a spoonful of finely diced pickle all sit comfortably in this style of salad.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a first course or light lunch, on lettuce leaves or with brown bread. Chill an hour before serving, and eat it the same day — the apple softens and the eggs weep by the second.
The name means "orphan salad," and it belongs to the long line of hearty cold fish-and-potato salads that European kitchens built around preserved fish: the German and Scandinavian herring salads, Russian vinaigrette. These share the same logic — a cheap salted or tinned fish stretched with boiled potato, hard-boiled egg and something sharp and fruity, bound with dressing. Fancifully sentimental salad names of this sort were common on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century menus, and the intended sense here is generally taken to be a dish of humble, orphaned scraps rather than a reference to any particular person. The pairing of oily fish with tart apple — strange to some modern palates — was then perfectly ordinary from Hamburg to Stockholm.