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Salmon Croquettes
Flake two cups of cold boiled or canned salmon with a silver fork. Season it with a little salt, mustard and cayenne.
Mix with it one cup of thick cream sauce, made by blending together one tablespoon of butter with two tablespoons of flour, and adding gradually one cup of hot rich milk or thin cream. Cook this in a double boiler or saucepan until smooth and thick, seasoning the sauce with salt, pepper and celery salt. Spread the salmon mixture on a buttered platter to cool. Heat one cup of canned peas with three teaspoons of butter, one teaspoon of sugar, two teaspoons of flour and three tablespoons of thin cream.
When the salmon is cold, shape a portion into a flat round cake, put a spoon of creamed peas in the center, cover with the salmon, make into a ball, dip in crumbs, beaten egg, and crumbs again, and fry to a golden brown in hot fat.
Garnish with parsley.-Annabel Lee.
Salmon on Toast Make a cup of drawn butter sauce by melting one tablespoon of butter, and stirring into it an even tablespoon of flour. When this is quite smooth, add one cup of boiling milk. Season with salt and cayenne pepper, or according to taste, and stir in one large cup of salmon, picked into flakes. When quite hot, add one egg, well beaten with three tablespoons of cold sweet cream. m. It should be served smoking hot, poured over round pieces of bread fried in butter. If this is too rich, it is very good served on toasted bread instead. - Mrs S. M.
Jones, Toledo, O.
Two recipes share the page: stuffed salmon croquettes from Annabel Lee, and a creamed salmon on fried bread from Mrs. Jones. Both hinge on a flour-thickened sauce, and both need more chilling time than the text implies.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Spread on a buttered platter to cool" means at least two hours in the refrigerator, until the mixture is firm enough to hold a shape without sticking to your palms. A warm or soft croquette mixture will burst in the fat and release the peas.
- Frying temperature"hot fat" for croquettes is usually taken today as somewhere around 375F, deep enough to float them. Cooler fat soaks in; hotter browns the crumbs before the center is warm. Two to three minutes should give a golden shell.
- Thin creamThin cream is roughly today's half-and-half; "rich milk" is whole milk. Heavy cream will make the binding sauce too fatty to set cleanly.
- The silver forkSilver was commonly called for with fish in this period; the usual explanation was that carbon-steel cutlery discolored fish and left a metallic edge. Any modern stainless fork is fine.
- Canned salmonA 14- to 15-oz can drained gives roughly a cup and a half, so two cups is a little over one can. Remove the skin; the soft vertebrae can be mashed in or discarded, as the recipe does not say.
- Creamed peasThe flour and cream here are only there to bind the peas into a spoonable core. Drain them well and cook the mixture until it is genuinely thick, or the filling will steam its way out.
- Bread crumbsFine dry crumbs, not fresh, for both coats; fresh crumbs hold too much moisture. Let the breaded balls rest 20 minutes in the refrigerator before frying to set the coating.
- The egg in Salmon on ToastOne beaten egg with three tablespoons of cream is a liaison, not a scramble. Add it off the heat, stirring, and return to low heat only briefly; boiling after the egg goes in will curdle the sauce.
- YieldThe croquette mixture makes about eight balls, serving four. The creamed salmon covers four to six rounds of fried bread as a light supper dish.
Croquettes were a fixture of turn-of-the-century American cooking because they solved a household problem: what to do with cold cooked fish or meat, bound in a thick white sauce and made presentable by frying. This one goes a step further with a hidden core of creamed peas, a small surprise in what was plainly meant as company food. Canned salmon is the quiet story here. Pacific canneries had made it one of the cheapest reliable proteins in the country by the 1890s, and cookbooks of the period print it interchangeably with fresh boiled salmon, as this recipe does. Both contributions are signed, credited by name and town, which marks this out as a reader-contributed collection.