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Fish and Egg Salad Combinations
1-For each person allow an egg and two anchovies.
Slice the egg thin, put it in a nest of lettuce, arrange the anchovies around the egg, top with Savory Mayonnaise and garnish with minced green peppers. 2-Combine one and one-half cups diced shrimps with one cup cold boiled rice, one-half cup chopped cucumber or celery, one teaspoon grated onion and Mazola Mayonnaise to blend. Serve on lettuce or cress. 3-Combine one and one-half cups flaked, cooked or canned fish (any kind) with one cup diced celery or finely chopped crisp cabbage and the sections of a small grape fruit. Add French dressing to moisten and serve garnished with Mazola Mayonnaise. 4-Combine one cup croutons, one cup diced celery, three coarsely chopped hard boiled eggs, two tomatoes cut in eighths and one tablespoon minced onion with Mazola Mayonnaise to blend. Serve on lettuce.
Four assembly formulas rather than cooked dishes, so the work is in the components: the mayonnaise, the boiled rice, the hard-cooked eggs. Each combination as written serves two to three as a light lunch, or four as a side.
- Mazola MayonnaiseMazola is a corn oil brand, so this is presumably the volume's own corn-oil mayonnaise, given elsewhere in the book rather than repeated on this page. Any good mayonnaise works; a neutral-oil homemade version is closest to the intent.
- Savory MayonnaiseApparently another named variant given elsewhere in the book; its contents are not stated here. Mayonnaise sharpened with mustard and a dash of Worcestershire will sit in roughly the right territory.
- AnchoviesTwo per person most likely means two fillets rather than two whole salt-packed fish. Saltiness varies a good deal between products; drain them and taste before adding any salt to the dressing.
- Eggs"An egg" in combination 1 and the three eggs in combination 4 are hard cooked, which the text takes for granted. Cook to just-set yolks and cool fully before slicing, or the slices break up in the lettuce.
- Cold boiled riceLong-grain, cooked and thoroughly chilled. Warm rice absorbs the mayonnaise and turns the shrimp salad pasty; a cup of cooked rice is roughly a third of a cup dry.
- ShrimpOne and a half cups diced is roughly half a pound of cooked, peeled shrimp. 'Diced' implies shrimp large enough to be cut down; small cooked shrimp can be left whole.
- Grapefruit sectionsCut the segments free of all membrane and drain them before adding, or the juice thins the French dressing and slackens the whole salad. One small grapefruit yields roughly three-quarters of a cup of supremes.
- CroutonsAdd them at the last moment in combination 4. Dressed croutons collapse within minutes, and the tomatoes release enough liquid to finish the job.
- French dressingIn this period the name means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, often around three parts oil to one of vinegar and sometimes paprika, not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name later came to mean in the United States.
This page comes from a promotional cookbook built around corn oil, which is why the mayonnaise is named as a brand rather than printed again on the page. Salads assembled from tinned fish, cold cooked rice and hard-boiled eggs suited the cold, made-ahead luncheon service of the period: food that could be portioned per person on a lettuce leaf. Listing several combinations under one heading, rather than giving each a name, is common in books of this kind; the reader could treat the ratios as a pattern and vary the fish, the crisp vegetable and the acid to whatever the market offered. The grapefruit in the third combination is a period marker, the citrus having become far more widely distributed by rail in the decades before these books were written.