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Scallop of Salmon
Open a can of salmon two or three hours before using, and remove all bits of skin and bone. Flake the fish into small pieces. Make a white sauce, and when done stir in the salmon. Pour all into a well-buttered pudding-dish, cover with bread crumbs and small pieces of butter, and bake.
A plain baked salmon gratin from the era when canned fish was a pantry staple. The original assumes you know how to build a white sauce and how long a scalloped dish wants in the oven; both need filling in.
- ProportionsNothing is quantified. For a standard 14-15 oz can of salmon, about 1 1/2 cups of white sauce gives a mixture that holds together without turning soupy: 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 1/2 cups milk, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little lemon or nutmeg.
- Opening the can earlyThe instruction to open the can two or three hours ahead comes from a period belief that airing dispelled a metallic "canny" taste from tin-lined cans. Modern cans are lacquered and this serves no purpose; drain the fish and use it. If it is left out, keep it refrigerated.
- Skin and boneCanned salmon still comes with both. The vertebrae are soft enough to mash into the mixture and add calcium, but the recipe wants them out, and the dark skin does discolour a pale sauce.
- Pudding-dishA deep ovenproof baking dish, not a steamed-pudding basin. A 1 1/2-quart casserole is right for one can of fish.
- Oven and timeThe original gives none. Bake at 375F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edge and the crumbs are browned. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the only aim is heating through and colouring the top.
- The crumbsThe recipe specifies only 'bread crumbs' and butter. Dry crumbs dotted with butter brown better than fresh ones; fresh soft crumbs will absorb sauce and go pasty unless you toss them in melted butter first.
- YieldOne can serves four as a light main course with a green vegetable, or six as a side.
Canned salmon reached American and British kitchens in quantity from the 1870s onward, when Columbia River and later Alaskan canneries made Pacific fish cheap and shelf-stable far inland, and cookbooks of the following half-century are thick with ways to use it. "Scallop" here is the old sense of the verb: to bake something flaked or sliced in a sauce under a crumb topping, the same construction as scalloped potatoes or scalloped oysters; the culinary sense is usually traced to the practice of baking such mixtures in scallop shells or shell-shaped dishes. Recipes of this type needed no fresh fish, no fishmonger and no skill beyond a white sauce.