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SALMON, SCALLOPED (Cold Meat Cookery)
Lift the flesh from the remains of cooked salmon, remove the skin and bones, and tear the meat into flakes. Season these rather highly with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Mix with them one-fifth of their weight in finely-grated bread-crumbs, and moisten them lightly with any cold sauce there may be, or, failing this, with clarified butter. Butter some scallop-shells, cover the inside with finely-grated bread-crumbs, and shake off any that do not adhera. Put in the fish, cover it thickly with crumbs, lay two or three little pieces of butter on the top, and bake the scallops in a brisk oven till the surface of the crumbs is brightly-browned. Serve the fish in the shell, neatly arranged on a hot dish, and covered with a folded napkin. If preferred, lightly-mashed potato may be mixed with the fish instead of bread-crumbs. If scallop-shells are not at hand, deep oyster-shells, well cleaned, may be used instead, or even shallow dishes will answer the same purpose. Time to bake the scallops, about a quarter of an hour. Sufficient, three or four scallops for a dish.
A leftovers dish from the era when a poached salmon was served whole and the remains had to reappear at breakfast or supper. The instructions are sound; only the vessels and the oven need translating.
- "Brisk oven"Read as roughly 400-425F. The fish is already cooked, so the point of the heat is to brown the crumb topping quickly without drying the flakes beneath.
- The quarter hourFifteen minutes at that heat is right for a filled shell straight from a cold larder. If your salmon and sauce are at room temperature, check at eight to ten minutes and pull them as soon as the crumbs colour.
- Scallop-shellsDeep scallop shells hold roughly 1/2 cup each. Small ramekins, gratin dishes or cocottes of that capacity work identically. If you do use real shells, scrub and boil them first.
- Crumb proportionOne-fifth of the weight of the fish: for 10 oz of flaked salmon, about 2 oz of crumbs. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, or the mixture turns pasty.
- "Any cold sauce there may be"The recipe assumes something left from the salmon's first appearance and does not say what; a white sauce or melted-butter sauce would be the likely candidates. A few spoonfuls of bechamel, creme fraiche or a slack mayonnaise thinned with lemon all do the job. Moisten lightly; the mixture should hold together, not slump.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it will not scorch or make the crumbs soggy. Melt unsalted butter gently and pour off the clear fat, leaving the white residue behind.
- Seasoning"Rather highly" is deliberate, since cold cooked fish is bland and the crumbs dilute it further. Taste the mixture before filling the shells.
- YieldThree or four shells make one dish; the recipe gives no number of eaters. Scale by the amount of salmon you have rather than the reverse.
Cassell's places this among the "Cold Meat Cookery" entries, a substantial category in Victorian and Edwardian household books because a large joint or a whole poached salmon was expected to feed a family across several meals. Scalloping was the standard treatment for cooked fish: flake, season sharply, bind with crumbs or potato, crumb the top and brown it, so that the second appearance looked like a fresh dish rather than a remnant. The scallop shells themselves were kitchen equipment, kept and washed between uses, and the folded napkin over the serving dish was a matter of presentation. The technique survives in coquilles Saint-Jacques and in the general habit of naming any small gratin dish a "scallop" or "scalloped" preparation, though that derivation is the traditional account rather than a settled one, a rival derivation from "collop" having also been proposed; the usage has since drifted to mean anything baked in layers with sauce.