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Salmon Croquettes
1 pound can salmon, 1/2 teaspoon salt, red pepper to taste, 1/4 cup crackercrumbs, 1/2 teaspoon grated onion, 1 well beaten egg, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley.
From 1 can salmon, opened neatly, take fish and chop it fine; add salt and pepper, Crisco, parsley and crackercrumbs; moisten it with the egg and mix well, turn out upon dish; then roll into cones, dip these in beaten egg seasoned with salt and pepper, roll in breadcrumbs. Fry in deep Crisco until delicate brown, drain them a moment, arrange neatly on hot dish and serve with tomato sauce. The Crisco should be heated until crumb of bread becomes golden brown in 40 seconds.
Croutes, a la Marie Pass 1 small tureen foie gras through fine wire sieve. Put in basin, add 1 teaspoon Crisco, pepper and salt to taste, and then stir in gently 1/2 a gill cream. Pipe with a star tube on to round croute of short crust; garnish with pimientoes cut in strips and whipped cream.
Two recipes have run together in this entry: salmon croquettes, and a separate canapé called Croûtes à la Marie. Treat them as unrelated dishes.
- Chill before shapingThe mixture is loose and will slump in the fryer. Refrigerate it at least an hour after mixing, and again for 20 minutes after breading, so the cones hold together and the crust seals before the interior heats through.
- The frying temperatureA bread crumb browning in 40 seconds puts the fat somewhere around 375F, though the test is only approximate. Use a thermometer; below that the croquettes drink oil, above it the crumb burns before the centre is hot.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book is advertising. It has been reformulated since to cut trans fats, now using fully rather than partially hydrogenated oil, but still works. Any neutral high-smoke-point frying fat substitutes directly, and butter substitutes for the tablespoon worked into the mixture.
- The canned salmonA 1 lb can of the period held skin and vertebrae. Both are edible and soften to nothing when mashed, and the bones carry most of the calcium. Modern skinless-boneless cans work but give a drier mixture; drain either kind well or the cones will not hold.
- "Chop it fine"Flake and mash rather than chop on a board. You want a paste that coheres, not distinct pieces of fish.
- Crackercrumbs versus breadcrumbsCrushed soda or water crackers bind the interior; dry breadcrumbs coat the outside. The distinction is deliberate and worth keeping, as cracker crumbs absorb more moisture.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. An eighth of a teaspoon is plenty for a pound of fish.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, serving four as a light main course with the tomato sauce.
- For the croûtes: a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of cream. A "small tureen" of foie gras means a small terrine. A croûte here is a round of short pastry, baked crisp, not a slice of toast.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company launched in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable shortening; the constant, slightly insistent naming of the fat in every recipe is the point of the book. Canned salmon made the dish plausible for a household of the period: Pacific canneries had been shipping it east in quantity since the late nineteenth century, and a shelf-stable pound of protein for a few cents made croquettes a standard weekday supper. The croquette itself is French in descent, a way of turning cooked leftovers into something that reads as a made dish, and the cone shape here is one of several forms croquettes took.