Layered Fish Salad with Sardines
Traditionally, under Orthodox custom Wednesday and Friday were fast days. On those days meat and meat products are forbidden, but fish is usually allowed. I read somewhere that in the former USSR “fish days” had no obvious connection with Orthodoxy.
More than 80 years ago, against a background of chronic meat shortages, “fish days” were introduced. But, as usual, with a view to how harmful religion was for the people, those days were not Wednesday or Friday but Thursday. On that day every canteen in the country served fish dishes, and nobody had yet heard of a crab stick salad recipe.
Canned fish, by the way, was plentiful back then and filled the shop shelves. It was also the last thing people swept off the counters when everything started to fall apart. To be fair, what was plentiful was the “plainer” kind: “Sprats in tomato sauce”, mackerel in oil or tomato sauce, sardinella, the fish “tourist’s breakfast”, which I simply adored as a kid, and huge round tin cans of Pacific herring (iwashi). The chosen few had almost unattainable sprats, cod liver, saury, sardines in square tins and other delicacies. The height of luxury was a 140 g jar of red salmon caviar.
My favourite childhood holiday sandwich was a slice of white loaf toasted and rubbed with garlic, topped with two sprats, a tiny piece of lemon, a pickled gherkin, parsley and a drop of mayonnaise.
My favourite salads from childhood were herring under a fur coat and Mimosa salad with sardines. They are true masterpieces of Soviet cooking.
Ingredients
2 servings
- Sardines in oil 1 can
- Eggs 3
- Garlic 1-2 cloves
- Potatoes 2-3
- Carrot 1
- Sauerkraut-style pickled cucumber 1
- Green onion tops 2-3
- Capers 1 tbsp
(10 g) - Homemade mayonnaise 3 tbsp
(43 g) - Hard cheese 50 g
- Salt, black pepper to taste
Step-by-step recipe
Hard-boil the eggs. Make sure they are cooked until firm, otherwise it will be hard to decorate the salad nicely with the yolk crumbs. Boil the potatoes, or better yet bake them in the oven or microwave. Then cool them. It is better to boil the carrot, or it will be tough.
Open the can of sardines. Pour the liquid into a cup, as you will need it later. Peel the potatoes and carrot.
You can build the fish salad in one big salad bowl, but it is better to do it in individual dishes, preferably transparent ones. Then all the layers are visible, which looks lovely and lifts your mood.
Put the coarsely grated potatoes on the bottom of the bowl. Level them gently with a fork, but never pack them down. The potatoes should lie quite loosely. Brush the potatoes with a little mayonnaise, less than 1 tbsp. For obvious reasons it is better to make the mayonnaise yourself, and it is not difficult. But if you trust the store-bought kind, you can save yourself the trouble.
Mash the sardines slightly with a fork, but not to a puree. Leave some pieces, like for fish soup from canned fish. Spread the sardines in a single layer over the potatoes with mayonnaise. Level them so there are no gaps and press down very lightly. A fork is handy for this.
Next you need a little sourness. Sauerkraut-style pickled cucumber does this perfectly. Note that I mean fermented, not marinated or ordinary home-canned cucumbers (I generally dislike cooked cucumbers). Barrel-pickled cucumber, or one fermented in a bucket, or, the way my mother does it, fermented in a jar and sealed with a tin lid. There is a whole battery of litre jars with cloudy brine standing in her cupboard. A delicious snack. I recommend it.
Peel the cucumber with a knife and grate it on a fine grater. Well, not the finest one, but finer than the one you used for the potatoes.
Spread the grated cucumber over the sardines.
Grate the carrot on a regular grater, spread it out and level it. You can add even more carrot, by the way. It is sweet and will only improve the flavour of the salad.
Put capers on top of the carrot. This step is optional, as they say. I just like the combination of fish and capers, it is a personal thing.
Now the fish salad needs to be moistened a little. All the ingredients are a bit “dry”, and I don’t want to drown everything in mayonnaise. Otherwise it turns into something like Olivier salad. In a mortar, crush the peeled garlic, a pinch of salt and ground black pepper. Thin it with the remaining liquid from the can of sardines, to taste. Pour the resulting sauce over the salad. You don’t need much, 1-1.5 tbsp per serving is enough. See for yourself.
Peel the hard-boiled eggs. Take the yolk out of one egg and set it aside for decoration. Although nothing stops you from keeping two yolks. But don’t take them all out: let at least one yolk go into the salad layer with the whites, as when making a tasty egg salad with olives. Grate the eggs on a coarse grater and spread them in a single layer over the fish salad, trying to cover the whole surface.
Brush the fish salad with the remaining mayonnaise.
Grate the hard cheese on a fine grater and spread it over the salad.
Scatter finely chopped green onion over the cheese, using only the green tops. The amount of hard cheese and green onion is up to you.
Grate the remaining egg yolk on a fine grater and sprinkle it over the whole fish salad, trying to leave at least a little of the green onion visible.
That’s really all. The fish salad is ready. But it is worth putting it in the fridge to soak and absorb the flavours, for an hour at least. As experience shows, though, the longer the salad sits there, the better.
The fish salad is served as a cold appetizer with an aperitif.
Calories and macros
670 kcal
Serving ≈ 460 g
- Protein42 g26% of kcal
- Fat39 g54% of kcal
- Carbs32 g20% of kcal
100 g146 kcalProtein 9.2 gFat 8.5 gCarbs 6.9 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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