Fish Loaf
(Canned Salmon, Fish Flakes, Tuna Fish, or Gray Fish may be used in this recipe, or two and a half cupfuls of any kind of left-over, cooked fish may be substituted.) 1 Pound Can Fish or 2½ Cupfuls Flaked, Cooked Fresh Fish 3 Eggs 1/2 Cupful Soft Bread Crumbs 1 Tablespoonful Melted Snowdrift 1 Teaspoonful Salt ⅛ Teaspoonful Pepper 1 Tablespoonful Minced Parsley Separate the eggs, beat the yolks till lemon-colored and the whites until stiff.
Flake the fish, add it with the remaining ingredients to the egg yolks, fold in the egg whites, and transfer to a pan, rubbed lightly with Snowdrift. Bake until firm in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F., about forty minutes. Serve with peas, Cream or White Sauce No. 2, Savory Egg Sauce, or Tomato Sauce.
A promotional recipe from a shortening company, and one of the more forgiving ways to use up cooked fish. The only technique that matters is the folding.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening, sold in the United States from around the turn of the twentieth century and later marketed alongside Wesson oil; by this book's date it was of the hydrogenated shortening type. Melted butter or a neutral oil does the same job in the tablespoon called for; the loaf pan can simply be greased or lined with parchment.
- "Gray fish"A trade name for spiny dogfish, pushed hard by American fisheries authorities during and after the First World War to move an unloved catch. Any firm white fish works — cod, haddock, pollock, halibut.
- "Fish flakes"Usually canned or boxed shredded salt cod, once a pantry staple, though the term was applied loosely to prepared flaked fish generally. If you use salt cod today, soak and drain it first and cut the added salt to a pinch, or the loaf will be inedibly salty.
- Canned fishTuna cans are much smaller today than the one-pound can called for; canned salmon is still sold in cans of about 14.75 oz. Two 7.5 oz cans of salmon, or three 5 oz cans of tuna, drained well, comes to roughly a pound, the alternative to the 2½ cupfuls of cooked fresh fish. Drain thoroughly or the loaf will weep.
- The pepper measurementPrinted as "1/ Teaspoonful" — a broken fraction in the original setting. It was probably a quarter or an eighth of a teaspoonful; season to taste.
- The hinge: foldingThe stiff whites are the only leavening. Fold them in with a spatula in three additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible; beating them in gives a dense, rubbery loaf.
- Pan and donenessThe recipe says only "a pan"; a standard 8x4 or 9x5 loaf pan suits the title. Bake at 350°F for about 40 minutes, as directed. It is done when the centre is set and springs back — an instant-read thermometer should show 160°F. Overbaking dries it badly.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. Let it rest five to ten minutes before turning out, or it will crack. Most of the sauces named are white sauces of the period, the tomato sauce excepted; a béchamel with lemon, or a simple tomato sauce, is the same idea.
Snowdrift was one of the branded shortenings on the American market from around 1900, and like its competitors it published cookbooks whose real purpose was to place the product in as many recipes as possible — hence a tablespoon of shortening in a fish loaf that hardly needs it. The dish itself belongs to the long era of the moulded loaf, when canned salmon and tuna were cheap, shelf-stable protein and a baked loaf turned them into something that could be sliced and sauced and put on a table with a certain formality. The inclusion of "gray fish" dates the book fairly closely: the rebranding of dogfish under that friendlier name was a wartime and postwar campaign to widen the American appetite for underused species, and it never entirely took.