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Salmon in A Mould
One can of salmon, four eggs beaten light, four tablespoonfuls melted butter (not hot), half cup of fine bread crumbs; season with salt, pepper, and minced parsley; chop the fish fine, rub the butter in till smooth; beat the crumbs with the eggs, and season before working together. Put in a buttered bowl and steam one hour. - Mrs. Ferris.
A plain steamed fish pudding of the sort that turned a pantry can into a hot supper dish. It needs almost nothing except attention to the egg-to-fish ratio and a steady, gentle steam.
- The canA period can of salmon was a pound; today's standard tall can is 14.75 oz, which is close enough. Drain it, but keep the liquid — a spoonful or two loosens the mixture if it seems stiff.
- Bones and skinTraditional canned salmon includes soft vertebrae and skin, both edible and both a source of calcium. Mash them in with a fork if you want them gone from sight; pick them out if the texture bothers you.
- Melted butter, not hotThe recipe is explicit that the butter must not be hot. It is rubbed into the chopped fish, and the eggs are beaten with the crumbs separately, but hot fat working through the mixture risks setting the egg before it is combined. Melt the butter and let it cool to barely warm.
- Crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" in recipes of this period usually meant soft crumbs from the interior of a loaf rather than dry commercial crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb more liquid and tend to a denser result, so reduce the quantity if that is all you have.
- The bowl and the steamButter a 1-quart heatproof bowl or pudding basin, cover it tightly with foil or a pleated cloth tied down, and set it on a rack in a large pot with water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up as it drops.
- DonenessOne hour is right for a quart bowl. It is set when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean, or when the centre reads 160F; a shallower dish will be done sooner, so start testing early.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the surface tears. It slices better warm than piping hot.
- Yield and servingServes about four as a main course, six as a first course. The recipe gives no sauce, though moulded fish dishes of the period were often sent to table with one — egg sauce, drawn butter with lemon, or a plain white sauce with capers or parsley.
Canned salmon reached American kitchens in quantity from the Pacific Northwest canneries in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 it was cheap, shelf-stable and available a thousand miles from any salmon river. Cookbooks of the period responded with dozens of ways to dress it up, and the steamed mould was among the most respectable: bound with egg and crumbs, turned out whole and sauced, it could pass at a supper table in a way a plate of flaked fish could not. The technique is older than the can — steamed fish and meat puddings in a buttered basin belong to a long English tradition — and the recipe simply borrows that form for a new ingredient. The attribution to Mrs. Ferris marks this as a contributed recipe, the standard method by which community and household cookbooks of the era were assembled from the kitchens of subscribers.