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Fish and Onion Salad
(Nantes.) Peel and core 6 small white onions, put a bit of butter in the centre of each, and bake them, in a covered pan, 1 hour, until tender. When cool, slice them, add 6 large sardines, free from bones and oil and skin, cut up, and 6 sliced hard-boiled eggs, some chopped parsley, and salt, and pepper, with a mixture of olive oil, and lemon juice, and tarragon vinegar. Mix all well, arrange on a dish, with slices of toast and parsley, very cold.
A composed salad built on baked onions rather than raw, which is what makes it worth the hour. The original gives no temperature and no yield.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits an hour of covered baking; the onions should collapse to translucent softness without browning, and a lid or foil is essential, since the point is to steam them in their own moisture and the butter.
- Coring the onionsCut out a cone from the root end deep enough to hold a knob of butter, but leave the outer layers intact so each onion holds its shape. Small white onions or large shallots both work.
- Cool them fullySlice the onions only once they are cold. Warm onion slices will weep and thin the dressing.
- The sardinesThe instruction to free them from oil implies tinned sardines packed in oil, a product strongly associated with the Breton and Vendee coast. Draining and wiping off the packing oil matters, since the dressing is meant to be olive oil and acid, not fish oil. Skinning and boning is easier if you leave the fillets in fairly large pieces and break them up at the end.
- The dressingNo proportions are given. Three parts olive oil to one part combined lemon juice and tarragon vinegar works well here; the tarragon vinegar is the flavour note, so do not substitute plain white vinegar without adding a little fresh tarragon.
- MixingThe recipe says to mix all well, but a light hand is better: six sliced hard-boiled eggs and flaked sardines both disintegrate quickly, and the salad is better with visible pieces than as a paste.
- Serve very coldChill at least an hour before serving so the onion takes up the dressing. Add the toast at the table, not before, or it goes soft.
- YieldSix onions, six sardines and six eggs make a substantial first course or light lunch for four to six.
Nantes sits on the Loire estuary, and in the decades either side of 1900 the Breton and Vendée coast was the centre of the French sardine trade, with canneries turning the summer catch into tins of fish packed in olive oil. A salad that treats tinned sardines as a main ingredient, alongside eggs and onions, is a fair picture of what a modest household in that region actually had in the cupboard. The baked onion is the more interesting part: cooking onions whole and covered until sweet, then dressing them cold, is often said to be a traditional French approach to onion salad, and it removes the raw bite that would otherwise overwhelm the fish. The tarragon vinegar places it firmly in the period, when a bottle of vinegar infused with tarragon was, by most accounts, a familiar kitchen ingredient.