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Salmon Salad
(Norway.) Remove the skin and bones of 1 pound of cold cooked fish and flake it into pieces with a fork. Mix it with the sliced yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs, a tablespoonful each of chopped olives and capers, and gherkin pickles, then add enough mayonnaise dressing, and arrange on a dish edged with lettuce leaves and pieces of aspic jelly, if this is at hand.
A cold-fish salad of the kind built to use up yesterday's poached salmon. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions assume a cook who will taste as she goes.
- Start with the fishA pound of cold cooked salmon is about two large fillets poached and chilled, or a pound of good tinned salmon drained well. Flake with a fork rather than chopping, so the pieces stay in curds rather than turning to paste.
- Yolks onlyThe recipe uses the three hard-boiled yolks sliced and folded in; the whites are left over. Chop them and scatter over the top, or reserve them for another dish rather than discarding.
- Gherkin picklesThese are small sour cucumbers in vinegar, not the sweet gherkins sold in most American supermarkets. Cornichons are the closest match. Slice or chop them; it is unclear whether the original's "chopped" extends to the gherkins, but chopped folds in better.
- Enough mayonnaiseDeliberately vague. Start with about half a cup for a pound of fish and add by the spoonful — the salad should bind, not swim. Olives, capers and pickles all carry salt and acid, so taste before adding any more of either.
- Aspic jellyA savoury gelatine set from clarified fish or veal stock, cut into pieces as a garnish. Few kitchens keep it now, and the recipe treats it as optional. Powdered gelatine set in good fish stock will do if you want the effect.
- Chill and serveMix, cover and refrigerate at least half an hour so the flavours settle, then arrange on the lettuce just before serving or the leaves wilt. Serves four as a light lunch, six as a first course.
The book's parenthetical "(Norway.)" tags the dish with a country and offers it as a souvenir of the table abroad. Salmon salad of this sort is less specifically Norwegian than the label suggests — capers, olives, gherkins and mayonnaise were the standard vocabulary of cold fish dishes across northern Europe and in American cookery alike — but Norway's salmon rivers gave the country a lasting association with the fish in the Anglo-American imagination. The aspic is treated as an optional convenience rather than a given: the author mentions it casually and adds "if this is at hand," which suggests it often was not.