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Salmon Croquettes
1 3/4 cups cold flaked salmon 1 cup Thick White Sauce Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon lemon juice Salt Add sauce to salmon, then add seasonings. Spread on a plate to cool. Shape, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain.
A standard croquette formula: bound salmon, chilled hard, breaded twice and deep fried. The recipe assumes you know what "Thick White Sauce" and "deep fat" mean, so those are the two gaps worth filling.
- Chill is the hinge"Spread on a plate to cool" is doing more work than it sounds. The mixture must be cold and firm all the way through — an hour in the refrigerator, ideally two — or the croquettes slump in the fat and burst. Shape while cold, then chill the breaded croquettes again for 20 minutes before frying.
- Thick White SauceIn books of this period a thick white sauce runs roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons butter and the same of flour to 1 cup milk, cooked out and seasoned — noticeably more flour than a pouring sauce. It is what holds the croquette together; a thin sauce will not set.
- Fat temperatureDeep fry at 375°F. Cooler and the crust drinks fat before it colours; much hotter and the outside browns before the centre warms. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only after colour — two to three minutes.
- Breading orderCrumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs is deliberate. The first dry coat gives the egg something to grip on a wet mixture. Thin the egg with a tablespoon of water or milk so it coats rather than clings in ropes.
- The salmonCold flaked salmon in a book of this period could well have been canned, which was cheap and widely available; two 6-ounce cans, drained and picked over, give about the right volume. Cooked fresh or leftover poached salmon works identically. Remove skin, and crush or discard the soft vertebrae.
- SeasoningSalt is left unquantified, perhaps because the saltiness of the salmon itself varies. Taste the bound mixture before chilling — once it is cold and breaded there is no fixing it. A teaspoon of lemon juice in nearly three cups of mixture is restrained; more is defensible.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, enough for four as an entrée course in the period sense — a small plated dish between larger ones — or three as a modern main with something green.
- DrainingDrain on a rack rather than flat on paper, which steams the underside. Serve promptly; croquettes do not improve on standing.
Croquettes were a backbone of the American cooking-school entrée, and this recipe follows the method associated with the Boston Cooking School and books like it: take a cooked protein, bind it with a stiff white sauce, chill, crumb, fry. The technique is French in origin — croquette from croquer, to crunch — and it suited American households for an economic reason, since it turned small quantities of leftover or canned fish and meat into something that could be sent to table as a distinct course. Canned Pacific salmon, commercially packed from the 1860s onward and shipped cheaply across the country, put salmon croquettes within reach of a cook far from any coast, working from the pantry. That the recipe opens with a measured cup of white sauce rather than an instruction to make one suggests the sauce was assumed knowledge, expected of anyone working from the book.