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Salmon, Tinned, with Macaroni
Grease a pie-dish and line it with crumbs, then fill it with alternate layers of boiled macaroni, moistened with hot milk, and tinned salmon, divided into flakes; season each layer with pepper and salt, and parsley or other herbs. Half a pint of plain anchovy sauce should be poured over all. The top layer should consist of macaroni, well coated with crumbs. Pour a little butter over, and bake quickly until brown.
A late-Victorian store-cupboard supper that assembles in ten minutes and needs only enough oven time to brown the top. Everything in it is already cooked, so the heat is for colour and setting, not for cooking through.
- Bake it hot and briefly"quickly" implies a brisk, well-heated oven; the recipe gives no temperature, but something in the region of 425-450F suits. Around twenty minutes should be enough to brown the crumbs and heat the layers through; longer dries the salmon and turns the macaroni pasty.
- Half a pint of sauceIn an English book of this date a pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is about 1 1/4 US cups. The recipe gives no other quantities, so scale the macaroni and salmon to the dish you are filling.
- Anchovy sauce"Plain anchovy sauce" here most likely means a thin white sauce (butter, flour, milk) flavoured with anchovy essence, though bottled anchovy sauce was also sold at the time. Two teaspoons of anchovy paste, or three or four fillets mashed in, stirred into a cup and a quarter of white sauce gives much the same effect.
- SaltTinned salmon, anchovy and the crumb coating all carry salt already. Season the macaroni layers lightly and taste the sauce before adding any.
- The pie-dishAn oval earthenware pie-dish; any shallow 2-pint baking dish works. Buttering and crumbing the sides is not decorative -- it stops the layers sticking and lets a portion lift out whole.
- Tinned salmon then and nowPeriod tins included the skin and the soft vertebrae, which were eaten along with the flesh. Skinless, boneless tins are milder and drier; the flavour improves if you use the packing liquid to moisten the macaroni along with the hot milk.
- MacaroniBoil it fully, to just past al dente, since it will not soften further in the short bake. Short-cut elbows or the long hollow macaroni of the period both work, broken into thumb lengths.
- Butter over the topMelted butter, poured or brushed on. Without it the crumbs scorch in patches rather than browning evenly.
- YieldFour generous portions as a main course with a green vegetable or a salad.
Canned salmon reached British kitchens in quantity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, once Pacific canneries in British Columbia, Oregon and Alaska were shipping to Europe, and it became one of the cheapest sources of good protein a modest household could keep on a shelf. Cassell's is full of such recipes: it was written for readers who could not count on reliable cold storage, and tinned fish, macaroni and anchovy essence all kept well. The layered crumb-topped pie-dish format was a common Victorian treatment for cooked flaked fish, whether it came from a tin or from yesterday's boiled salmon, and dishes like this bear a clear resemblance to twentieth-century tuna-noodle bakes.