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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 W. H. Parsons.
A basic egg-enriched white sauce sized for a single salmon loaf. The whole thing hinges on how the egg goes in.
- Temper the eggBeat the egg in a bowl, whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into it, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat. Dropping a cold beaten egg straight into a very hot white sauce, as the wording invites, can curdle it.
- Do not boil after the eggOnce the egg is in, hold the sauce below a simmer — roughly 160-180F. Above that the egg curdles and the sauce breaks into grains.
- "Sweet milk"Nineteenth-century shorthand for fresh whole milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- "The juice of the salmon"The liquid the loaf's salmon came in, most likely from a can, canned salmon being widely used for loaves at the time. It can be salty, so taste before adding any salt of your own.
- Cook the flour firstMelt the butter, stir in the flour and let it bubble a minute before the liquid goes in. The recipe skips this, but it is what keeps the sauce from tasting pasty.
- QuantitiesOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a thin pouring sauce. If the loaf is dry, or you want it to coat rather than run, go to a tablespoon and a half of each.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough to sauce a small family-sized loaf. Make it while the loaf rests and pour it on at the table; it skins over quickly.
Fish loaf was a fixture of American home cooking once canned salmon became cheap and widely distributed in the later nineteenth century — Pacific Northwest canneries put a shelf-stable fish into inland kitchens that had never reliably seen one. Bound with crumbs or cracker and egg, baked in a bread pan and turned out sliceable, the loaf stretched a single can across a family supper, and it needed a sauce because it was by nature dry. This one is the standard drawn butter or cream sauce of the period, thickened further with egg and given back the canning liquid so nothing of the fish is wasted. The attribution to Mrs. W. H. Parsons is typical of the era's community and household compilations, where recipes circulated under the name of the woman who contributed them rather than any professional cook.