Cole-slaw
Sliced raw onion Sliced tomato Lettuce Chop the egg fine, add the herring, minced onion, parsley and mayonnaise to blend. Arrange the salad on lettuce, putting the egg mixture in the center, cole-slaw at each end, the sliced onion and tomato, overlapping, at the sides.
This is the assembly half of a composed supper salad; the printed page carries only the tail of its ingredient list, so a certain amount has to be supplied from context. The instructions themselves are sound and require no cooking beyond hard-boiling an egg.
- The list is truncatedOnly the garnish ingredients — onion, tomato, lettuce — survive as a list, while the method calls for egg, herring, parsley, mayonnaise and cole-slaw with no quantities at all. Any amounts have to be reconstructed: for a platter of this kind, two hard-cooked eggs, about 6 oz of herring, a tablespoon of minced onion, a tablespoon of parsley and 3-4 tablespoons of mayonnaise would suit.
- Why it is filed under Cole-slawThe cole-slaw is a component here, spooned at each end of the platter, and the page carries that heading. Any plain cabbage slaw dressed with mayonnaise or boiled dressing suits; about 2 cups would be enough.
- Which herringA chopped salad of this kind most likely means cured herring — salt herring soaked and drained, or pickled herring from the jar — rather than fresh, though the recipe does not specify. If using salt herring, soak it in cold water several hours and change the water once, or the salad will be inedibly briny. Jarred pickled herring needs only draining and a rough chop.
- The egg"Chop the egg fine" assumes hard-cooked, cooled and peeled. Chop it, do not mash, or the mixture goes to paste and loses the texture the dish is built on.
- MayonnaiseAdd it a spoonful at a time and stop when the mixture just holds together. Herring and cured fish release liquid as they sit, and an over-dressed centre will slump across the platter.
- Assembly and holdingBuild the platter no more than an hour ahead and keep it refrigerated. Sliced tomato weeps onto lettuce quickly, so lay the tomato and onion on last if the salad must wait.
- YieldAs written it makes one platter; no serving count is given, though a platter of this size would do for a light supper for about four.
Herring salad of this sort was a fixture of the cold supper table in American cookbooks, borrowed from Northern European practice — German and Scandinavian households made much of chopped salt herring bound with egg, onion and dressing, sometimes with beet or apple, and immigrant cooking carried it into the general repertoire. The cole-slaw beside it has a longer American pedigree still: the word is generally traced to Dutch koolsalade, cabbage salad, shortened to koolsla and heard in English as "cold slaw" for much of the nineteenth century. What the page really documents is the composed salad platter, a style often associated with the supper menus of the period: cured fish, egg, raw vegetables and a mayonnaise, arranged in blocks on lettuce so that a cook with no range time to spare could still set down something that looked deliberate.