Fish Salad
To make a delicious fish salad, pick up canned salmon or any cold fish; season it with salt and paprika and cover it with mayonnaise dressing, with which has been mixed chopped olives, capers, pickles, chow chow or any other relish of the kind. Serve it on lettuce or cress. About a cupful of dressing to two cupfuls of fish will be needed.
A late-Victorian assembly salad that assumes a can of salmon in the cupboard and a bowl of homemade mayonnaise in the cold room. The proportions are the useful part: two parts fish to one part dressing by volume.
- The ratioOne cup of dressing to two cups of flaked fish, as the recipe directs. Consistency varies: if your mayonnaise seems too thick to coat the fish lightly, start with two-thirds of a cup and add more, or slacken it with a spoonful of lemon juice or the pickle brine.
- "Pick up" the fishMost likely means to flake or break the fish apart with a fork rather than mince it. Remove skin and the soft round vertebrae from canned salmon if you dislike them, though both are edible and were often mashed in.
- Canned salmon then and nowCanned salmon of the period was largely Pacific sockeye ("red"), packed with salt alone, though chinook and pink were canned too; sockeye is oilier and firmer than much of what is sold today. Pink salmon is milder and wetter; drain it well or the dressing will slide off.
- Chow chowA mustard-and-turmeric pickle of chopped green tomato, cabbage, onion and cauliflower, still sold in the American South and in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Piccalilli, sweet pickle relish or a coarse-chopped giardiniera all stand in.
- PaprikaPaprika in American kitchens of this period was generally a mild sweet Hungarian-style powder, used as much for colour against the pale fish as for heat. Smoked paprika would dominate the dish; use plain.
- Mayonnaise and holding timeIf you make the dressing from scratch it contains raw yolk; use pasteurized eggs and keep the finished salad refrigerated. Dress it no more than an hour or two before serving, since salt and acid draw water out of the fish and thin the coating.
- YieldTwo cupfuls of fish plus dressing makes four modest salad-course servings on lettuce, or filling for six sandwiches.
Salads of this kind belong to the moment when canned fish became a reliable pantry staple: commercial salmon canning on the Columbia and Fraser rivers and in Alaska put cheap tinned red salmon into ordinary American kitchens through the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks responded with quick dishes built on an opened can. The recipe is also a piece of leftover management dressed up for company, which is why the author offers "any cold fish" in the same breath as salmon. Mayonnaise-bound salads served on a lettuce leaf were fashionable throughout this period, and the list of optional relishes -- olives, capers, pickles, chow chow -- shows how far the bottled-condiment trade had reached into the domestic larder by 1900.