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Salmon Crumbs
This is a highly-esteemed dish in the North of Ireland. A quantity of cold boiled salmon is divided into very small fragments, and mixed with bread-crumbs, an egg or two well whisked, butter, pepper, salt, and a little vinegar; after which it is put in a pudding-dish, and baked in an oven. The proportion of the ingredients is not very definite, but is variously regulated according to taste. Vinegar is often used with this dish.
A leftovers dish with deliberately vague proportions. The useful work is fixing a ratio that binds without turning pasty, and giving the oven a number.
- A working ratioFor 1 lb of cold cooked salmon, use about 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs, 2 eggs, 2 oz melted butter and a tablespoon of vinegar. More crumb makes it dry and stodgy; less and it slumps rather than slices.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven temperature, only 'baked in an oven'. 350F works for a set custard-bound mixture; bake 25-30 minutes, until set in the centre and lightly coloured on top.
- "Pudding-dish"A deep earthenware baking dish, not a mould set in water. A 1-quart gratin or pie dish, buttered, holds the quantity above.
- The salmon is already cookedThis is a reheating dish. Overbaking is the only real risk, since the fish dries out long before the egg is in danger of being underdone. Pull it as soon as the centre is firm.
- BreadcrumbsNineteenth-century crumbs meant stale bread grated by hand, coarse and dry. Modern dried packet crumbs absorb far more liquid; use fresh crumbs from day-old bread, or hold back some of the quantity.
- The vinegarMentioned twice, so it is not incidental. A plain malt or cider vinegar cuts the richness of oily salmon and butter. Add it to the beaten egg so it disperses evenly rather than curdling in one spot.
- SeasoningCold boiled salmon is usually undersalted. Taste the mixture before it goes in the dish, since there is no correcting it once baked.
- YieldThe quantities above serve four as a light main course with potatoes, or six as a first course.
Cassell's appears to place this among the plain regional dishes of the British Isles, and the note about the North of Ireland is the whole of its provenance. It belongs to a large family of Victorian "remains" cookery: a household that had poached a whole salmon for a cold table was expected to turn the leftovers into something hot the next day, whether as a fish pie, a mould, or a baked crumb dish like this one. The refusal to fix proportions is characteristic of the genre, since the cook was working from whatever was left rather than from a shopping list. Salmon in this period is often said to have been comparatively cheap in Ireland and Scotland where the rivers ran well, though the claim is hard to document, and the vinegar reflects an older British habit, generally traced back through centuries of pickled and soused fish, of serving salmon with something sharp.