Salmon on Toast
Toast thin slices of stale bread quite brown and crisp. Butter while hot. Heat 2 cupfuls, or 1 can, of cold salmon picked into small flakes; add a cupful of lobster sauce, a half cupful of sweet cream, salt, white pepper, and a dash of paprika. When very hot remove from the fire, stir in 1 egg (beaten very light), and pour over the toast. Sift a little very finely minced parsley over the top, or garnish with watercress. Drawn butter or oyster sauce may be substituted for the lobster sauce.
A creamed-salmon dish built on the assumption that a cook has a pan of lobster or drawn butter sauce already made. Once the sauce is in hand it takes about ten minutes.
- The hinge: the egg goes in off the heatTake the pan off the burner before stirring in the beaten egg, then keep stirring. Returned to direct heat it will scramble and the mixture will look curdled rather than glossy.
- "1 can" of salmonTwo cupfuls of flaked fish is roughly 10-12 oz drained, so two 6 oz cans, or one standard can, or an equal weight of cooked fresh salmon all work. Pick out the skin if you like, but mash the soft vertebrae in — they dissolve and carry most of the calcium.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh unsoured cream, not sweetened. Light cream or half-and-half is closest; heavy cream makes a noticeably richer dish.
- Lobster sauceA period lobster sauce is a white or drawn-butter sauce enriched with lobster meat, coral, and sometimes a little cayenne. A cupful of butter-and-flour sauce loosened with milk or fish stock, with chopped cooked lobster stirred in, gives the intended effect.
- Drawn butter and oyster sauceDrawn butter here is the old flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply melted butter. "Oyster sauce" means a cream sauce with poached oysters in it, not the bottled Cantonese condiment — that would be badly out of place.
- Stale bread mattersDay-old bread toasts drier and crisper and will hold up under a wet mixture. Fresh bread goes limp within a minute. Cut thin, toast dark, butter while hot so it soaks in.
- White pepper and paprikaWhite pepper was standard in pale sauces to avoid black specks. Use sweet Hungarian paprika; hot or smoked paprika changes the dish entirely.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities will stretch to about four as a lunch or supper dish, over two slices of toast each. Assemble at the last moment and serve immediately.