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Sardine Salad (Arrange one pint of any kind)
Arrange one pint of any kind of cooked fish on a bed of crisp lettuce. Split six sardines, and if there are any bones, remove them. Cover the fish with the sardine dressing. Over this put the sardines, having the ends meet in the center of the dish. At the base of the dish, make a wreath of thin slices of lemon. Garnish with parsley or lettuce, and serve at once.
A composed cold salad that assumes you already have leftover cooked fish and a jar of the book's sardine dressing on hand. Two things need translating: the volume measure for the fish, and the dressing itself.
- Sardine dressingThis presumably refers to a companion recipe elsewhere in the book; such dressings were generally a mayonnaise or boiled dressing into which mashed, boned sardines had been worked, sometimes loosened with lemon juice. If your book lacks it, mash two or three drained sardines to a paste and beat them into about a cup of thick mayonnaise with a squeeze of lemon.
- A pint of cooked fishFish was measured by volume when flaked. A pint of loosely flaked cooked fish is roughly 12 oz to 1 lb by weight — a large fillet of salmon, halibut, cod or haddock, or the usable meat from a small boiled fish.
- "Any kind of cooked fish"This is a leftovers dish. Firm, flaky white fish and salmon hold their shape; oily fish already competes with the sardines. Poached or baked is better than fried, since a crust turns soggy under dressing.
- Splitting the sardinesTinned sardines are cooked and sterilised in the can, so their spines are usually soft and edible. The instruction to remove bones likely reflects a preference for appearance rather than necessity. Drain them well on paper first or the oil will slick the dressing.
- The arrangementThe sardines are laid like spokes with their ends meeting at the centre, over the dressed fish, with thin lemon slices ringing the base of the dish. Build it on the serving dish, not in a bowl, since the whole point is the pattern.
- Serve at onceNot a flourish. Lettuce wilts under dressing within minutes, and a cold fish salad should not sit at room temperature — assemble it just before it goes to the table and keep the components chilled until then.
- YieldFour moderate servings as a luncheon dish, or six as a first course.
Sardine salads appear in American cookbooks through the later nineteenth century, and they owe their existence to the tin. Canned sardines — packed in France, later in Maine and in Portugal — were among the first widely available tinned proteins for ordinary households, cheap enough for everyday use but foreign enough to read as a delicacy on a luncheon table. This recipe shows a common turn-of-the-century approach to leftovers: cold cooked fish, which would otherwise be plain, is masked with a rich dressing and then dressed up architecturally, with a wreath of lemon and a radiating pattern of whole sardines. The salad course in books of this period was as much about presentation as flavour, and the instruction to have the ends meet in the centre of the dish is the real recipe here.