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Salmon Puffs
1 can salmon 2 eggs 3 tablespoons melted butter 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup bread crumbs Salt and pepper to taste.
Stir all together and put in mould.
Steam 1 hour.
A steamed savoury pudding of the kind that once shared a chapter with suet puddings and roly-polys. It is simple, but it depends on two things the original assumes you know: the size of the can and how a mould is steamed.
- The canA period can of salmon was commonly a tall one-pound tin, roughly 450 g including liquid. Modern cans are often 213 g, so use two, or a single larger tin of around 400 g, and do not drain away all the liquid — it carries much of the moisture in the mixture.
- Bones and skinCanned salmon of this era was packed whole, vertebrae included. The bones are soft enough to crush with a fork and are worth mashing in; the skin can go in too or be lifted out, as you prefer.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from the inside of a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a dense, pasty pudding; if that is all you have, use about two-thirds of a cup.
- SaltCanned salmon usually has salt added in the packing. Taste the mixture before adding any, and season mainly with pepper.
- The mouldButter a one-quart pudding basin or metal mould well, fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover tightly with buttered parchment or foil tied down — steam condensing into the top will waterlog the pudding otherwise.
- SteamingSet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover and keep at a bare simmer for the hour. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel set, not liquid.
- Individual puffsThe plural in the title may point to small moulds or buttered cups, though the recipe itself specifies a single mould; smaller moulds would need roughly 25 to 30 minutes rather than an hour.
- Yield and servingAbout four to six servings. It is bland on its own by design — the period expectation is a white or egg sauce, or a parsley cream sauce, poured over at table.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and its recipes reflect what a Canadian household could reliably get in the years around the First World War. Canned salmon was one of those things: the British Columbia canneries on the Fraser and Skeena were shipping east by rail, and tinned salmon became a cheap, shelf-stable protein in kitchens a continent away from any salmon river. Steaming a fish dish in a mould looks odd now, but the steamed mould was simply the standard way to set anything bound with egg and crumbs, sweet or savoury, in a kitchen where the stovetop was more dependable than the oven. Dishes of this type — salmon loaf, salmon puffs, salmon scallop — recur through North American community cookbooks for the next fifty years on essentially the same formula: fish, crumbs, egg, butter, lemon.