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Salmon Cromeskies
Take the remains of cooked salmon, free it from skin and bone, and tear the flesh into flakes. Put the fish into a saucepan with a small portion of white sauce, a little pepper and salt, and the yolks of three eggs. A spoonful of minced truffles may be added, or not. Stir the mixture over the fire for a few minutes till the eggs are set, then spread the preparation an inch thick on a plate, and leave it till cold. Divide it into equal-sized portions, and mould these in the form of corks. When the cromeskies are to be served, dip them separately into frying batter, and fry in hot fat till they are brown and crisp. Drain, serve on a hot dish, and garnish with parsley. The batter may be made as follows. Put five ounces of flour into a bowl. Add a pinch of salt, and mix the flour smoothly with a quarter of a pint of water. Beat the yolks of two eggs with two table-spoonfuls of oil; stir the mixture into the batter, and add more water if necessary. Ten minutes before the batter is wanted, add the whites of the eggs whisked to froth. Time to fry the cromeskies, three or four minutes.
A Victorian way of using up cooked salmon: a stiff egg-bound croquette mixture, chilled, shaped, battered and fried. The whole thing hangs on the mixture being cold and firm before it meets the fat.
- Chill it properlyThe inch-thick slab needs to be genuinely cold and set through before shaping — two hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Warm or soft mixture will burst the batter in the fat and empty itself into the pan.
- Don't scramble the binderThree yolks stirred over direct heat will curdle if the pan is too hot. Keep it over low heat, stirring constantly, and pull it off as soon as it thickens and holds together.
- White sauce quantity"A small portion" is left unquantified. For about a pound of flaked salmon, 4-5 tablespoons of thick bechamel is a workable starting point — enough to bind, not enough to loosen the mixture.
- Batter measuresFive ounces of flour is a scant cup and a quarter; a quarter of a pint in this British book is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. The batter should coat the back of a spoon thickly.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "hot fat." For three or four minutes' frying, 350-375F is the usual modern equivalent. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above it the outside colours before the cold interior warms through.
- Cork shapeRead as cylinders roughly two inches long and an inch across. Uniform size matters more than the exact shape, so they fry evenly.
- TrufflesOptional in the original and expensive now. A tablespoon of finely chopped mushroom cooked dry, or a few drops of truffle oil stirred in when the mixture comes off the heat, gives a comparable savoury note.
- Yield and servingA pound of cooked salmon should give roughly eight to ten cromeskies, about four servings as a first course. Serve immediately; the batter softens soon after it leaves the fat.
Cromeskies is the anglicised spelling of the French cromesquis, itself generally traced to the Polish kromeski; the dish appears in French professional cookery in the nineteenth century and passed from there into English kitchens. In classical practice a cromesqui differs from a croquette in being wrapped — often in caul fat or a thin sheet of bacon or pancake — before it is dipped in batter and fried; here the wrapper has been dropped and only the batter kept. Its place is as a way of turning yesterday's cold boiled salmon into something that could be sent to table as a hot entree — the same logic behind fishcakes, rissoles and scallops of cold meat in the Victorian household manuals.