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Salmagundi
(Old English salad.) Wash and split and remove the bones of two large Dutch or Scotch herring, and mince the fish with the white meat of a fowl, 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 onion, 1 anchovy, a tablespoonful of grated ham or tongue, and season with salad oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt. Then arrange in a mound on a dish and serve with a border of lettuce. The recipe was brought from Spain to England in early times.
A cold composed salad of cured herring and cooked poultry, bound with an oil-and-vinegar dressing rather than mayonnaise. The whole thing hinges on the salt: everything in it except the eggs is already salted, so the fish must be tamed before it meets the seasoning.
- Dutch or Scotch herringBoth mean salt-cured herring, not fresh. Dutch maatjes or Scandinavian-style matjes fillets from a jar are the closest thing on sale now; salt-packed herring should be soaked in cold water or milk for several hours, changing the water once or twice, then drained and dried before mincing.
- White meat of a fowlA "fowl" generally meant a mature hen, often one bought for boiling, and the dish may well have been a way of using up what was left of one. Use about 8 oz of cooked chicken or turkey breast, poached or roasted and cooled, cut small rather than shredded.
- The anchovyA single whole salt-cured anchovy is meant, roughly two modern fillets. Rinse off the packing salt and mash it to a paste so it disperses; a teaspoon of anchovy paste does the same job.
- Grated ham or tongueGrating a firm cured meat on a coarse box grater gives fine threads that distribute through the salad. Prosciutto or any dry-cured ham, finely chopped, is a reasonable stand-in for the pressed tongue.
- Onion, rawOne onion is a great deal for this quantity. Half a small onion or a couple of shallots, minced very fine and rinsed under cold water to draw off the harshness, suits modern palates better.
- Season with salad oil and vinegarNo proportions are given; three parts oil to one part vinegar was a common proportion of the period, about 3 tablespoons oil to 1 of vinegar here. Salad oil usually meant a mild olive oil. Taste before adding any salt at all -- the herring, anchovy and ham may have supplied enough.
- Arranging the moundPress the dressed mixture into a bowl or teacup and turn it out onto the serving dish to get a clean dome, then ring it with whole lettuce leaves. Chilling it for an hour firms the mound and lets the dressing settle into the fish.
- YieldEnough for four as a first course or a light lunch. It does not keep well past a day, as the raw onion and the cured fish both sharpen overnight.
Salmagundi appears in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward as a made dish of minced cold meats, fish, eggs and pickles arranged in patterns or in a mound -- a way of turning leftovers into something worth carrying to table. The name is generally traced to the French salmigondis, itself of uncertain origin, and the claim of Spanish descent made here is a traditional one that turns up repeatedly in Victorian and Edwardian books without much evidence behind it. What is documented is the word's afterlife: by the eighteenth century "salmagundi" already meant any miscellany, which is why Washington Irving and his friends used it as the title of their satirical magazine in 1807.