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Swedish Salad
Bone and skin 4 sardines, cut each into 4 pieces, add an equal amount of cold sliced and cooked meat, in pieces 1 inch square, 30 drops of onion juice, 1 cooked and sliced beet, 1 cooked and cut up potato, a spoonful of chopped parsley. Mingle these in a bowl lined with lettuce, cover with a dressing of 6 tablespoonfuls of oil, 2 of vinegar,--tarragon preferred,--salt, and pepper. Mix these carefully, and garnish with hard-boiled eggs.
A composed leftovers salad in the Continental manner, closer to what a Swede would call sillsalad than to anything modern menus label salad. Nothing here is difficult; the care goes into the cutting and the folding.
- Onion juice, 30 dropsGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve; 30 drops is roughly a third of a teaspoon. Grated onion pulp itself will do, though it makes the dressing cloudy rather than sharp and clean.
- Cold cooked meatThe book assumes a joint sitting in the larder. Cold roast veal, beef, or boiled tongue all work; dice enough to match the volume of the sardines, which for four boned fish is only an ounce or two. Avoid anything cured and heavily smoked, which will fight the fish.
- SardinesTinned sardines in oil are the likeliest reading, though fresh are not excluded. Drain them, lift out the backbone with the tip of a knife, and peel away the skin if it comes willingly. Four sardines cut in four gives sixteen pieces, so keep them intact rather than mashing.
- The beet will bleedDress the beet separately in a spoonful of the oil and vinegar and add it last, or fold everything only two or three turns. Otherwise the whole bowl turns uniform pink within minutes.
- The dressing ratioSix oil to two vinegar is 3:1, the standard vinaigrette proportion and sharper than the 4:1 some modern recipes prefer, and correct against beet and potato. Tarragon vinegar is still sold; a plain white wine vinegar with a few bruised tarragon leaves steeped in it is an adequate stand-in.
- "Mix these carefully"Ambiguous: "these" may be the dressing ingredients, or the dressed salad, since the dressing has just been poured over. Either way, the salad itself should be turned, not stirred.
- Serving and yieldEnough for four as a first course or two as lunch. Serve it cool but not straight from the refrigerator, since cold flattens the oil. The lettuce lining is structural as much as decorative, so use whole leaves of a firm butterhead.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) collected dishes Adelaide Keen gathered from European kitchens for American cooks, which explains the national label on a salad no Swedish cookbook would title this way. The dish behind it is sillsalad, the beet-and-herring salad that has appeared on Swedish cold tables for generations, often said to come from the same thrift that produced every other cold-meat salad in Northern Europe: boiled potato, boiled beet, salt fish, and whatever remained of yesterday's roast, bound with oil and something sour. The substitution of tinned sardines for salt herring may be a sign that this is a translation for an Anglo-American pantry. Hard-boiled eggs around the rim finish the salad, doing the work that a sprinkle of herbs or seeds does now.