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Salmon Loaf
Take one can of salmon, drain off the juice, chop fine; add yolks of four eggs beaten light, one-half cup of grated bread crumbs, four tablespoons of melted butter, one-half teaspoon of pepper (scant), one-half teaspoon of salt, and a little chopped parsley. Beat whites of eggs stiff and add last. Put in buttered pan and bake half an hour.
Dressing for Loaf - One cup of sweet milk (added to the juice of the salmon), one tablespoon of butter, one tablespoon of flour. Cook until thick, add one egg beaten light. Pour over loaf.
— Mrs. Wm. H. Van Orden
A simple canned-fish loaf of the sort that filled church-supper tables once cheap canned salmon reached inland towns. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own can size, so both need pinning down.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 350F; the loaf is essentially a savory custard and will weep or crack if pushed hotter. Half an hour suits a shallow loaf pan — test that the center is set and reads 160F.
- The can of salmonA period can was a full pound. Modern tall cans run 14.75 oz, so one large can is close enough; two 6-oz cans are a little light and the loaf will be softer. Traditional canned salmon includes skin and vertebrae, which are edible and were commonly mashed in rather than picked out — remove them if the texture bothers you.
- Drain and save the liquidThe drained juice is not waste here; it goes into the sauce with the milk. Expect 1/4 to 1/3 cup. Add it to the milk before thickening rather than after, or the sauce may look curdled.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which many households kept on hand for baking.
- Grated bread crumbsDry crumbs grated from stale bread, not the soft fresh crumb and not seasoned packaged crumbs. Half a cup of dry crumbs is roughly 2 oz; soft fresh crumbs would need closer to a cup to bind the same way.
- The whitesFolding the stiff whites in last is what keeps the loaf light instead of dense and rubbery. Fold in thirds and stop while a few streaks remain; overworking here undoes the whole point of separating the eggs.
- Finishing the sauceThe tablespoon of butter and tablespoon of flour make a thin roux for the cup of milk plus the salmon juice — a light pouring sauce, not a binding one. Temper the beaten egg with a ladle of the hot sauce before it goes in, and keep the pan off a hard boil afterward or the egg will scramble.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course with potatoes or peas. It slices best after ten minutes' rest, and is good cold the next day.
Canned salmon was one of the first industrially processed foods to become genuinely cheap, and by the closing decades of the nineteenth century Pacific Northwest canneries were shipping it east by rail in enormous volume. For an inland kitchen far from the coast, a can on the pantry shelf meant fish in the house at any season, and community cookbooks of the period are thick with salmon loaves, croquettes and scallops built on it. The construction here — flaked protein, crumbs, eggs separated and the whites folded in, all bound and sauced — is the standard American loaf method of the era, applied interchangeably to salmon, veal, chicken or nuts. The attribution to Mrs. Wm. H. Van Orden is the usual form of these community collections, where recipes traveled under a contributor's married name.