Slice ½ pound of cooked salmon; then heat 1 ounce of butter in a stew-pan; add 2 small onions chopped fine, 1 ounce of cocoanut, 2 hard-boiled eggs chopped. Let cook a few minutes, then add 1 pint of milk; let boil up once. Add the fish, 1 teaspoonful of curry paste, 1 teaspoonful of paprica and salt to taste. Let cook a few minutes, then stir in 1 large tablespoonful of boiled rice. Serve very hot with toast.
A creamed Anglo-Indian fish dish, close kin to kedgeree, meant for using up cooked salmon. It comes together in about fifteen minutes, and the whole risk is in overcooking.
- The hinge: barely cook the fishThe salmon is already cooked, so it goes in only to heat through — two or three minutes at a bare simmer. Boiled hard in the milk it turns dry and chalky, and the flakes break down into the sauce.
- Weights and measures1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 1 ounce of coconut is roughly a third of a cup of dried grated coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold for cakes. Read the pint as 2 cups if the book is American; a British pint would be 20 fl oz.
- That much milkA pint of milk to half a pound of fish gives a soupy result by modern expectations. Either let it reduce for a few minutes before the fish goes in, or start with a cup and add more only if it tightens too far.
- "Paprica"Paprika. The sweet mild grade is the safer reading here; a teaspoon of hot smoked paprika would dominate the dish, so use sweet and let the curry paste carry the heat.
- Curry pastePeriod curry paste was a bottled Anglo-Indian condiment, oily and salty, closer to Patak's than to Thai paste. A teaspoon of a mild madras-style paste is the nearest thing; taste before salting, as these pastes are already salted.
- The riceOne tablespoon of cooked rice in a pint of sauce is a thickener and a texture note, not a starch base. If you want it as a supper dish rather than a creamed spread, serve it over rice instead of stirring rice in.
- SalmonCooked leftover salmon is the intent; tinned salmon, drained and flaked, will also work. Remove pin bones and skin before flaking.
- YieldServes two generously, or four as a small first course on toast. It does not reheat well — the salmon stiffens.
This is Anglo-Indian cooking as it reached the English-speaking home kitchen: a British Raj dish, filed under a country the cook was unlikely to have visited. The template — flaked fish, hard-boiled egg, rice, curry, all bound and served hot — is essentially kedgeree, generally traced to the Indian rice-and-lentil dish khichri and reworked by British households into a breakfast and supper staple. Books of this kind, offering one dish a day and a different nation each morning, were selling armchair cosmopolitanism.