Lunch and Learn - The History of Tuna

For lunch today I made a tuna salad sandwich; to feed the craving I have been having for the last several days. Tuna fish sandwich on toast; made with chopped celery, onion, pepper and salt and mayonnaise. I am reminded of Lent and the Friday night meal of tomato soup and tuna sandwiches that my mother made. In addition to the tuna sandwich, her "tuna talents" included macaroni and tuna salad. That's it. No Salad Niciois; no tuna casseroles; no tuna melt or tuna bake; and I didn't have Ahi Tuna until many years later.

This sandwich got me thinking. . .who decided to make tuna a salad?

Canned tuna is a staple. An April 2009, survey commissioned by the National Fisheries Institute found that "four out of five. . .U.S. adults usually keep cans or pouches of tuna in the house at any given time. More than half of adults have a least three. . .and one in four usually keep five or more cans or pouches of tuna at home."

I started my "research" on the origins of the word "tuna". My friend Webster cites the word with an American origin somewhere between 1880-85; a variation of the Spanish word atun; derived from the Greek Thunnus; a genre of game fish. Tuna is a fish, so why do we call it "tuna fish" or "fish fish"? We don't refer to snapper as snapper fish or salmon as salmon fish. Is it so good we have to say it twice?

A survey of old cookbooks and menus confirms that meat and mayonnaise-type salads were popular in America from colonial times to present. These dishes were culinary traditions brought over by European, primarily German, settlers. The tuna salad is an early twentieth century recipe.

Canned tuna was first mass marketed in the U.S. in 1903. American cookbooks began to offer tuna as an alternative to chicken and turkey in salad recipes. I found the following recipe from Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Recipes, Marion H. Neil (1916):

Tuna fish salad
1 can of Tuna fish
shredded lettuce
salt and red pepper to taste
1 tablespoonful vinegar
2 tablespoonfuls lemon-juice
Mayonnaise dressing
1 tablespoonful capers
1 hard-cooked egg
2 or 3 stuffed olives.
Line a salad dish with shredded lettuce. Break the fish into pieces and place it on top of the lettuce. Mix the salt, red pepper, lemon-juice, and vinegar together and pour over the fish. Chill, and when ready to serve, decorate with the capers, slices of hard-cooked egg, and the stuffed olives. Service with mayonnaise dressing. Another method - Flake one can of Tuna fish with a silver fork, add one and one half cupful of diced celery and one half cupful of broken English walnut meats, mix with mayonnaise - or boiled dressing. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves."

The Christian Science Monitor, ran a story in February 1913, "Tuna Now Popular Fish Food":

"In California the tuna is being introduced generally in the best restaurants, no only because it is new, but because people are beginning to value it for what it is. Tuna salads are getting to be popular. The housekeeper can prepare the fish in a dozen different ways."

Now, hasn't this post brought a whole new meaning to "lunch and learn." Bon Appetite!