Chamomile Salad with Fish and Vegetables
“Chamomile” is a showpiece fish salad: grated cooked vegetables aren’t layered but arranged as bright petal-like rays around a mound of fish, so the finished platter really does read as a flower — until the host stirs it all together and the guests groan. The recipe comes from the reader-letters page of the magazine “Skatertina-Samobranka,” sent in by Svetlana Zemskikh.
The whole trick is keeping the colors clean. Grate each vegetable onto its own plate and rinse the grater between them, or the beet will tint the carrot and potato a muddy shade. It also helps to lightly squeeze the juice from the beet before you arrange it.
For the fish, choose a can packed in its own juices rather than oil — the flavor stays cleaner. Saury, pink salmon, or mackerel all stand in nicely for salmon. The brined cucumbers (Eastern European salt-cured pickles, not the sweet-vinegar kind) bring the sharpness; if you only have marinated ones, use those but ease off the salt. Dress just the fish center with mayonnaise and leave the rest of the vegetables dry until serving, so the design holds.
Part of Ukrainian cuisine — 286 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Boil the vegetables (beet, carrot, potato) until fully tender, cool, and peel them.
Grate each vegetable separately on a coarse grater, keeping them apart. Finely chop the brined cucumbers and onion.
Mash the fish with a fork and mound it in the center of a large round platter.
Around the fish, lay out the grated vegetables, alternating their colors so they fan out from the center to the edges in wide rays, like the petals of a chamomile.
A rough distribution: 3 mounds of beet, 2 each of carrot, potato, and peas, and 1 each of onion and cucumber.
Salt lightly. Coat the fish center with mayonnaise and garnish with fresh herbs.
Bring the salad to the table in this decorative form, and just before eating, gently mix all the layers together.
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