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Sardine Salad (Excellent relish for luncheon)
Sardine salad is an excellent relish for luncheon. Arrange the sardines on a bed of lettuce and garnish with olives and radishes and cover with mayonnaise dressing.
A composed salad rather than a mixed one, and the whole thing hangs on the quality of the fish. Everything else is arrangement.
- Which sardinesTins of the period generally held small sardines packed in oil. Buy oil-packed rather than water- or tomato-packed, and drain them on paper before plating or the mayonnaise will slide off.
- Bones and skinIf the tin is not labelled skinless and boneless, lift each fish and slip out the spine with the tip of a knife. The bones are edible and soft, but they make an unpleasant texture under mayonnaise.
- The dressing"Mayonnaise dressing" in a book of this date would have meant a made-from-scratch oil-and-egg-yolk emulsion rather than anything jarred. Jarred works; loosen it with a spoonful of lemon juice so it coats rather than sits in a lump. If you make your own, pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice for a dish served cold and uncooked.
- LettuceUse leaves firm enough to hold their cup shape, left whole rather than shredded. Chill and dry them thoroughly; wet leaves dilute the dressing.
- GarnishesPlain green olives in brine suit the plate. Radishes cut into fans or roses and crisped in ice water for half an hour are still the fastest way to make this plate look deliberate.
- An addition the period allowedA squeeze of lemon over the fish before the dressing goes on, and a scatter of capers or chopped hard-boiled egg, are all consistent with contemporary versions and improve the balance against the oily fish.
- Yield and timingTwo tins dress four luncheon plates. Assemble within twenty minutes of serving; the mayonnaise weeps and the lettuce wilts if it stands.
Sardine salad belongs to the era when canned fish was a modern convenience rather than a fallback. Tinned sardines, packed in oil in Brittany from the early nineteenth century and later in Maine and Norway, arrived in American pantries as a reliable, shelf-stable luxury, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s put them into salads, on toast, and into sandwich fillings with enthusiasm. The recipe's brevity is telling: it assumes the reader already keeps sardines and can make mayonnaise, and needs only to be told how to arrange them. The word "relish" here carries its older sense of an appetizing side dish meant to sharpen the appetite, not a chopped pickle condiment — the role a small, salty, oily plate is often said to have played in the light midday luncheon that middle-class households of the period are traditionally described as serving between a large breakfast and a formal dinner.