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Salmon Salad (Open the can of salmon several)
Open the can of salmon several hours before it is to be used, turn out the fish, free it from skin and bone, drain off all the liquor and break the fish into large flakes. Marinate with a dressing and set aside in a cool place. Have *ready a well-chilled soup plate. Drop into it the yolk of an egg, add a pinch of salt and a dash of cayenne and stir with a silver fork until well mixed. Add olive oil drop by drop, being careful to stir in the same direction, until the mixture is very thick. Add a few drops of vinegar or lemon juice, then more oil and continue adding oil and acid until a cupful of oil has been used. Both lemons and vinegar vary so in strength that no precise quantity can be given, although the amount of oil will usually require one tablespoonful of vinegar or two of lemon juice. When the dressing is smooth and all the oil has been incorporated, set away at once in a cold place. Just before serving, arrange on a platter a bed of washed and drained lettuce. On it place the prepared fish, garnish with part of the dressing and serve the remainder with the salad.
Two recipes in one: a hand-beaten mayonnaise and the salad it dresses. The mayonnaise is the part that needs attention; the salmon is a matter of assembly.
- Add the oil slowly at firstThe emulsion is made or broken in the first two tablespoons. Genuine drop-by-drop addition is only necessary until the yolk visibly thickens and pales; after that you can pour in a thin steady stream. If it separates, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it a spoonful at a time.
- Everything cold, including the oilThe chilled soup plate was standard advice of the period: a cold yolk and cold oil were held to give a firmer, more stable emulsion, and a wide shallow dish gives the fork room to work. A balloon whisk in a bowl works as well for the beating.
- The "silver fork"Probably to avoid reactive metal such as iron, which can discolour egg and react with vinegar. Stainless steel, glass or ceramic are all fine now; the fork itself carries no virtue.
- ProportionsOne yolk to a cup of oil is a workable ratio, though two yolks to the cup is more forgiving and gives roughly the same volume of finished dressing, about 1 1/4 cups.
- Raw eggThis dressing is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs in shell if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, keep the finished mayonnaise refrigerated, and use it within three or four days rather than the week a jarred one lasts.
- "Marinate with a dressing"The book does not say which; in a recipe of this kind it most likely means a plain oil, vinegar, salt and pepper dressing, applied ahead so the fish absorbs it. It is a separate step from the mayonnaise.
- The salmon itselfA 14-15 oz can, or two 6 oz cans, suits this quantity of dressing. Modern canned salmon still contains skin and the soft vertebrae, both edible, but the recipe wants clean flakes, so pick them out. The several hours' head start is the marinating time the recipe calls for; draining well matters just as much.
- YieldServes four as a lunch dish on a bed of lettuce, with dressing left over for the table.
Canned salmon was one of the first industrial foods to reach an ordinary American pantry in quantity, cheaply and year-round, once the Pacific Northwest canneries scaled up in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Cookbooks of this period are full of ways to make a virtue of it, and the salmon salad was among the more respectable-seeming: cold, composed, served on a platter, and lifted almost entirely by the dressing. That the author spends the bulk of the text on the mayonnaise and a few lines on the fish tells you where the skill was thought to lie. Mayonnaise is generally traced to the Mediterranean, with the name most often linked to Mahon in Menorca, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented; what is certain is that before electric beaters it was a test of patience, and household manuals explained it at length because so many cooks broke it.