Salad with red fish and tomatoes

The salad itself with red fish and tomatoes is such an elementary dish that there is absolutely nothing to talk about it - in my opinion, everything is clear from the name. Moreover, there are really no required components in this recipe, except for some (any!) canned red fish and tomatoes. So I’ll tell you the story of how the salad with red fish and tomatoes ended up on my menu.

This was in the mid-nineties. In general, in the last century and in shaggy antiquity. I came to Moscow to dress up and stay with my beloved aunt (yes, back then you still had to go somewhere special to buy fashionable things). And my aunt, a very gastronomically savvy woman who follows new products, decided to pamper me and take me to the Patio-Pizza restaurant on Tverskaya (yes, yes, then “Patio-Pizza” was such a cool establishment that it was located right in the National on Tverskoy). They had a real Italian chef, real Italian ingredients, and pizza from a REAL WOOD WOOD OVEN! There was also a salad bar! Now everyone knows what a salad bar is, but then I saw it exactly for the first time in my life. But now we have come close to the topic. People, I don’t remember anything else from the assortment of that salad bar except this salad, which sank into my heart and blew me away! Now I understand that it was a tomato salad with tuna - but at that time I had not yet seen canned tuna and did not know that it was pink! So I decided it was a salad with red fish and tomatoes. Based on the fact that the fish was purely reddish in color, and not gray, like, say, the mackerel I’m used to.

I don't remember what kind of pizza we ate there. I don't remember what we drank there. I remember a couple who were eating lobster (or rather, hiding behind a vase of flowers and TRYING TO EAT LOBSTER), because neither of them had any idea how to use all these tweezers and hooks, but they wanted lobster. And I also remember this salad. So you can consider it my most vivid impression of one day of my life (along with the torture instruments for cutting lobsters, I don’t know what struck me more then).

What was so surprising about this? Yes, for the first time in my life I saw a salad made from fresh tomatoes and canned fish. I don’t know how it is in the south, but in the area where I come from, canned fish was only used in winter salads, i.e. combined with boiled potatoes and eggs. This is how my first acquaintance with Mediterranean cuisine took place (Soviet pizza does not count!). And, of course, I was not slow in altering the dish, according to my capabilities and ideas. Which you can safely do too. For example, capers are excellently replaced here with finely chopped pickles or chopped pickles. Where would I get capers from in the mid-nineties? Yes, I didn’t even understand what kind of curiosity this was! When I reproduced the salad at home, I was guided purely by taste sensations. And now, for example, I have nowhere to get pickles. So let's use what we have, logical?

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