Canned Salmon
The California canned salmon is nice served cold with any of the fish-sauces. For a breakfast dish, it may be heated, seasoned with salt and pepper, and served on slices of toast, with milk thickened with flour and butter poured over it.
Two serving ideas rather than a worked recipe: cold salmon with a sauce, or warmed salmon on toast under a flour-thickened milk sauce. The whole thing turns on the sauce, since the fish arrives already cooked.
- The hinge: do not cook the fish twiceCanned salmon is fully cooked in the can. Warm it through in the sauce or over low heat for a minute or two only; longer and it goes dry and grainy.
- "Milk thickened with flour and butter"This is a plain white sauce. Roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little lemon. Some nutmeg or chopped parsley is period-appropriate.
- QuantityA standard 14.75 oz can, or two 6 oz cans, with the sauce above serves three to four on toast.
- Bones and skinNineteenth-century canned salmon came packed with skin and vertebrae, as many cans still do. The bones are soft and edible and add calcium; mash them in or pick them out to taste. Skinless-boneless packs need no work at all.
- Which fish to buyCanned salmon of the 1870s was mostly chinook, the species the early West Coast canneries packed, first on the Sacramento and then on the Columbia. Canned sockeye is the closest in richness and colour; pink salmon is milder, softer and cheaper.
- The liquid in the canDo not throw away the packing liquid. Whisk a few spoonfuls into the white sauce for flavour, reducing the milk to match, and drain the rest.
- Fish sauces for the cold versionThe book points the cook to its own fish-sauces without naming one here. A mayonnaise, a mustard cream or a caper sauce all suit cold canned salmon and require no cooking.
- ToastUse bread sturdy enough to hold sauce: a thick slice, well toasted, ideally buttered before the salmon goes on so it does not turn to paste.
Canned salmon was a new convenience when Buckeye Cookery appeared, and its presence in a Midwestern household manual is itself the point: a fish from the Pacific coast had become available in Ohio, shelf-stable and cheap. Commercial salmon canning on the Pacific coast is generally credited to the firm of Hapgood, Hume & Co. -- the tinsmith Andrew Hapgood with the Hume brothers -- which set up on the Sacramento River in the mid-1860s before moving north to the Columbia, where the industry boomed through the 1870s. That is likely why the recipe specifies "California canned salmon" rather than simply salmon, and why it offers no cooking instructions worth the name; the work had already been done in the cannery, and the cook's job was reduced to a sauce and a slice of toast. Creamed fish on toast in this style stayed a standard American breakfast and supper dish well into the twentieth century.