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Salmon Croquettes (Chop fine two pints of salmon)
Chop fine two pints of salmon, one and a half teacupfuls of cream, three large tablespoons of butter, two of flour, four eggs, five gills of bread crumbs; pepper and salt to the taste.
Braid butter and flour together. When the cream begins to boil, stir in the flour, butter, salmon and seasoning. Boil up for two minutes, then stir in two eggs well beaten, take from the fire, and as soon as cold shape, and prepare the same as you would other croquettes.
A standard croquette panada: a thick butter-flour-cream base bound with egg, folded through cooked salmon, chilled hard, then breaded and fried. The measurements are volumetric and need translating.
- Two pints of salmonFish was commonly measured by volume once chopped. Two pints of flaked fish is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, or about two 14-15 oz cans, well drained and picked over for skin and vertebrae. The recipe does not specify whether the salmon is fresh-cooked or tinned.
- Teacupfuls and gillsA teacupful in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though some books treat it as a gill (1/2 cup); on the 3/4-cup reading, one and a half teacupfuls of cream is a scant 1 1/4 cups. A gill is half a cup, so five gills of bread crumbs is 2 1/2 cups.
- "Braid butter and flour"Here it means working the two to a paste, what is now called beurre manie; the odd wording may be a compositor's slip or a dialect usage. Three tablespoons butter to two of flour is a butter-heavy ratio and gives a soft, rich binding rather than a stiff roux.
- Where the four eggs goOnly two are beaten into the hot mixture. The remaining two are presumably for the breading, since "prepare the same as you would other croquettes" implies an egg wash before the crumbs.
- The crumbs are for coatingThe 2 1/2 cups of crumbs are not stirred into the mixture; "prepare the same as you would other croquettes" means flour, egg wash, then crumbs. Dry fine crumbs adhere better than fresh.
- Chilling is the hingeCroquettes made with this much cream and butter will burst in the fat unless the base is refrigerated until genuinely firm, at least three or four hours and preferably overnight. Shape, then chill the shaped croquettes again for thirty minutes before frying.
- FryingDeep fat at about 375F, three or four at a time so the temperature holds; two to three minutes to a deep gold. If the salmon went in already cooked or tinned, colour is a fair guide; if it was raw, the two-minute boil may not have cooked it through and the croquettes need checking for doneness.
- YieldAbout 14 to 16 croquettes of the usual cork or cone shape, serving six to eight. Croquettes of this kind were often sent to table with a cream or egg sauce and lemon, though this recipe gives no accompaniment.
Croquettes were everywhere in American cookbooks between about 1880 and 1920, and a great many of them were made of fish, salmon among them. The canning of Pacific salmon on the Columbia River from the late 1860s put a cheap, shelf-stable, respectable protein into inland kitchens that had never seen fresh salmon, and cookbooks responded with croquettes, loaves and salads built around the tin. The technique itself is French in origin -- a thick veloute or panada used to bind chopped cooked meat, then crumbed and fried -- and its arrival in domestic manuals of this kind reflects how thoroughly cooking-school instruction had carried French method into ordinary American households. The dish also solved a practical problem: it turned leftovers or a cheap tin into something that could be shaped, sauced and sent to table looking deliberate.