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Baked Canned Salmon
One can of salmon, one cup of drawn butter. Shred the salmon carefully, removing the bones. Season with salt and pepper. Put into a buttered dish. Cover with bread crumbs one-half inch thick. Put cover on baking dish, and bake fifteen minutes. Then remove cover and brown.
— Miss Mabel Hill
A church-supper casserole from the era when canned salmon was cheap protein in every pantry. The only real puzzle is the "drawn butter," which is not melted butter.
- Drawn butterIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter is a simple flour-thickened butter sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then a cup of hot water or milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. A cup of plain melted butter would flood the dish and break out as grease.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in household cookbooks of the period. The recipe asks for fifteen minutes covered, then the cover off to brown; a moderate oven, around 375F, with a few extra minutes uncovered, is a reasonable modern reading, though the recipe itself gives no indication.
- The canThe modern standard can runs about 14 to 15 oz; period cans were commonly sold as one-pound tins. Two smaller 6 oz cans or pouches will substitute; drain them well or the sauce thins.
- Bones and skinThe instruction to remove bones is optional by modern taste. Canned salmon vertebrae are soft, calcium-rich and disappear when mashed; the skin can go in as well if you do not mind the texture.
- CrumbsA half-inch of crumbs is a thick lid. Use dry crumbs rather than fresh, and toss them with a spoonful of melted butter so they brown evenly instead of scorching in patches.
- SaltCanned salmon is already salted. Season the fish lightly and taste the sauce before combining.
- YieldServes three to four as a supper dish in a 1-quart baking dish. An acid alongside helps: lemon, pickled beets, or a vinegared cucumber salad.
Canned salmon transformed American home cooking after the Pacific Northwest canneries scaled up in the 1870s and 1880s, putting cheap, shelf-stable fish into inland kitchens that had rarely seen it. Recipes like this one — the can, a white sauce, a crumb topping, a short bake — became a fixture of community cookbooks precisely because they were reliable and required nothing perishable beyond butter and milk. Signed contributions of this kind are characteristic of the fundraising cookbook genre, in which a congregation or club pooled its household standbys. The escalloped or baked canned-fish casserole was still being printed, almost unchanged, in mid-twentieth-century American cookbooks.