Tuna salad with emotional baggage

Yellow fin tuna

Who knew that the subject of tuna salad was fraught with so much emotion! Yet a long—and I do mean long—thread on the Facebook New York Times Cooking Community page demonstrates the intensity of feelings. As someone who has eaten tuna all my life, staring with plain with lemon and progressing to salad, I was amazed at the variety of suggestions. And the passion behind some choices. One woman wrote that she knew tuna salad would be an emotional and deeply triggering topic. She did? I had no idea.

The big thing seems to be the binder—and mayonnaise wins over Miracle Whip hands down. People who don’t like Miracle Whip were not iffy about it—they were downright intense. Like never, never, never speak those words. The second big choice was water pack vs. oil pack. For years I’ve sought out the best water pack I could get—I now order it from a cannery in Oregon, as I’ve said. But a woman from Oregon wrote that they know tuna should be packed in oil; otherwise your salad gets watery. I will admit that my friend Betty makes the best tuna ever with oi-packed, hard-boiled egg, sweet pickle (not relish), and onion. No lemon, and that surprises me.

Mayonnaise, onion, lemon, seem to be the usual, with the frequent addition of hard-boiled eggs, pickle (some choose sweet, some choose dill). A few add mustard—I’ve tried a bit of Dijon, and it does add a nice spark.

But some unusual additions: panko (doesn’t it get soggy?), fish sauce (really?), jalopeno (okay, I don’t like peppers much), olives, curry, Old Bay seasoning, raisins, and carrots (shredded we hope). A suggestion I intend to try—a pinch of sugar to lessen any bitterness, not that I find tuna salad bitter, but it might act as sugar does in a tomato sauce. My mom said it rounds it off, and I was never sure what that meant but it seemed to be a good thing.

In the United Kingdom, wrote one woman, they put corn nibletts in tuna salad and serve it in a “potato jacket”—your imagination can probably supply that. A man wrote he marinates a tuna loin overnight in herbs, olives and EVOO, bakes it and then, I suppose, flakes it—or maybe he slices it and isn’t talking about salad at all.

A local restaurant serves a “deconstructed” tuna salad—but to me, it’s regular tuna salad, with slices of cheese and tomato and melon on the plate. The salad itself isn’t deconstructed.

This thread went on for days and weighed on my mind, so I made tuna salad today and decided to be bold and add pickle. But I didn’t have Betty’s sweet pickles, so I put in sweet relish. It was okay, but I prefer my basic which is chopped scallions, salt and pepper, lots of lemon, and mayonnaise to bind. I’m a purist. And I have two sons-in-law who won’t either one touch tuna salad. I worry about what they’re missing.

That was my big preoccupation today, but I remembered what I was going to mention yesterday. Several years ago, my son Jamie registered me for 23andMe—the results were a bit skewed from what I expected, and I was disappointed—not much Scot in this proud Scot. But yesterday unexpectedly I got a summary—I am something like 99.9% from the northern and western part of Europe, mostly United Kingdom, followed by France and Germany (I have always thought I was half Scot, half German). Other things were minimal, and my Neanderthal heritage had shrunk to “trace ancestry” which I suppose is a good thing. Being part Neanderthal is hardly something one wants to put on a resume.

Lazy day—other than doing quite a few housekeeping chores like emptying garabage, hanging up clothes, mopping up the muddy footprints (I created more streaks—mopping is not one of my talents and it’s hard to do seated in a walker). But I devoted some time to an absorbing mystery I’m reading. Imagine my shock when I checked the Amazon reviews and found I’d written one in 2017! And here I am reading it again as though for the first time. I’m not sure if that’s a tribute to the author or not. When I was at TCU Press, a member of our editorial board rejected a mystery because, he said, mysteries are forgotten the minute you finish the last page. I would like to think that’s not true and that, instead, my re-reading is a tribute to the author’s skill at drawing me into a plot. I won’t reveal the title or author so as not to prejudice you.

Here we go into another week, this predicted to be chilly but no cold with slight chances of rain until the end of the week. Hope it’s a good one for everyone.