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Tuna Fish or Salmon Sandwiches
Allow one and one-half tablespoons minced salmon or tuna fish to a sandwich. Season with lemon juice. Combine with Mazola Mayonnaise to blend. Spread on buttered bread, top with sprigs of watercress or shredded lettuce, press on the top slices of bread and cut in halves to serve.
A formula rather than a recipe: the book gives a per-sandwich ratio and expects you to scale it. A few of its assumptions have shifted.
- Scaling the ratioOne and a half tablespoons of minced fish per sandwich is a thin filling by current standards — a 5 oz can of tuna, drained and flaked, works out to roughly six to eight sandwiches at that rate. Two to three tablespoons per sandwich reads as normal today, which gets you three or four from a can.
- Mazola MayonnaiseThe book carries a corn-oil brand name, and the mayonnaise called for is presumably one made with Mazola oil, most likely a formula elsewhere in the same volume. Any commercial mayonnaise substitutes directly; add it a spoonful at a time, since minced fish takes less than you expect before it turns loose.
- "Minced"Mince means chop fine on a board, not mash — the texture the recipe wants is closer to a chopped salad than to a paste.
- Salmon bones and skinCanned salmon then, as now, includes soft vertebrae and skin. They are edible and can be mashed in; pick them out if you would rather not.
- Buttered breadThe butter is structural, not decorative. It seals the crumb against the mayonnaise and lemon juice so the bread does not go grey and damp — worth keeping if the sandwiches will sit for an hour or more.
- Lemon and seasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, and canned fish varies enormously in salinity. Taste after the mayonnaise goes in; a squeeze of lemon per can is about right, more if the fish is oil-packed.
- WatercressGiven as the first of two options, watercress or shredded lettuce; the pepperiness carries against the mayonnaise where lettuce adds mostly water. Use the leafy sprigs and discard the thick lower stems.
This comes from a corn-oil manufacturer's promotional cookbook, a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century when brands distributed recipe booklets to teach households what to do with a new product. Canned tuna was itself relatively new to American tables — the Southern California packing industry only got going in the early 1900s, after sardine canneries turned to albacore — and it entered the middle-class repertoire largely through the luncheon sandwich and the creamed casserole. The recipe's structure, a per-sandwich allowance rather than a batch, suggests something about how such books may have been used: one can imagine housekeepers assembling for a bridge party or a ladies' luncheon, where the number of guests was known and the filling could be portioned to match — though that is an inference from the format rather than a documented use.