There’s always been a place in my heart for tuna salad (especially at this time of year, when it makes the summer sandwich supreme), but as a practicing Foodie, I’ve also always felt guilty about this predilection. After all, serious gastronomes aren’t supposed to tolerate, much less love, anything that comes from a can.
I’m not alone-according to the Great American Food Almanac, each day Americans eat 1.7 million pounds of canned tuna, enough to make 15.7 million sandwiches. All the same, I was relieved when I picked up a copy of Vogue and found Barbara Kafka owning up to her canned tuna habit: “A word in defense of canned tuna fish, one of America’s great contributions to the world of food; and no, I am not jesting. I am not about to try to bring back tuna-noodle casserole… but I will stake my gastronomic laurels on the fact that tuna salad makes one of the all-time great sandwiches.”
Sue Kreitzman, author of Comfort Food, is another food authority willing to go on record with her tuna sandwich habit.
Kreitzman’s TSS consists of mayonnaise, lemon juice, salt and pepper, celery, onion, and dark, water-packed tuna. This is about as basic as tuna salad gets; in fact, except for that overpowering onion, it is a match for my recipe. In the course of researching this story, I learned that, like snowflakes, no two tuna salads are alike.
Most people keep it fairly simple: tuna, mayo, celery, onion, and pickle relish (to my taste, enough to singlehandedly ruin any tuna salad) are the most common variables. But some individuals aren’t content with mundane ingredients; they are compelled to explore the full range of tuna salad possibilities. These tin-can Cortezes come up with tuna salads that range from odd-sounding but surprisingly pleasing {my sister’s grated carrot and mayo) to outlandishly sublime (Pacific Express’s blue cheese, grapes, and tarragon mayonnaise) to absurdly complicated (the recipe given me by Terry Murphy, publisher of this magazine, runs two pages, and involves chopped bean sprouts, a jalapeno, and hard salami).
Given that no one is going to change his ritualistic method of making tuna salad. I will forgo a recipe and offer instead some observations on the varieties of canned tuna. The tip is this: tuna salad must be made a la minute. Because tuna oxidizes, with unpleasant visual and gastronomic results, the best tuna sandwich is made minutes before it’s consumed.
As for the tuna taste test, after buying all the varieties of water-packed tuna I could find at my supermarket (I chose water-packed because it has thirty-six calories an ounce compared to fifty-six calories an ounce for drained, oil-packed), I learned the following; although the highest-priced solid white Alba-core tunas taste very much alike, there is considerable variation among chunk tunas. They ranged from two mild-tasting, pleasing chunk tunas that were ringers for solid white tuna (President’s Choice and Star-Kist) to a few strong-scented varieties that would be better termed Alpo of the sea (Geisha in particular bore an unfortunate resemblance to tuna mush).
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