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Egg and Herring Salad
1 cup up minced, pickled herring 4 hard boiled eggs 1 tablespoon scraped or minced onion 1/2 tablespoon parsley
An ingredient list rather than a method, which was common in supper chapters where the assembly was assumed to be obvious. A few things are worth settling before you start.
- What is missingNo dressing, seasoning or method is given. Comparable cold chopped salads of the period are variously bound with mayonnaise, boiled dressing or sour cream, or simply dressed with oil and vinegar. Nothing in the original tells you which, so choose and note that you are choosing.
- Pickled herringBuy plain salt-and-vinegar cured herring fillets in brine rather than the cream-sauce or wine-sauce jars, which bring their own dressing and sugar. Drain well and blot; wet herring will thin whatever binder you use. One cup minced is roughly 6-8 oz of fillet.
- Scraped onionScraping means drawing a knife or spoon edge across a cut onion face to collect pulp and juice without fibre. It gives onion flavour that disperses evenly instead of crunchy pieces, and it is worth doing rather than substituting a fine dice.
- SaltDo not salt until you have tasted. Pickled herring carries a great deal of salt, and four eggs will not absorb as much of it as you expect.
- The eggsChop rather than mash, and let them cool completely first, or they break down into paste against the herring. Some cooks reserve one yolk to sieve over the top.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; the quantities will make roughly two cups, enough for perhaps two to four depending on how it is served. Serve cold on lettuce, or spread on buttered rye or pumpernickel; it also holds a day in the refrigerator, though the onion sharpens overnight.
Pickled herring was the cheap, keeping fish of northern Europe, and it travelled with Scandinavian, German and Jewish immigrants into American kitchens, where it turned up in exactly this sort of cold chopped salad. Combinations of herring, hard-boiled egg, onion and sometimes beet or apple are common across Baltic and central European cooking, and the fuller versions are generally traced to that tradition. The placement here in a supper chapter is telling: in many households a large midday dinner and a light cold evening meal was the pattern, though it varied a good deal by region, class and era, and a salad built from a jar of herring and a few boiled eggs needed no fire at all, which mattered in a kitchen heated by a coal range.