Home › Dressed Fish › Bread-crumbs (Separate the salmon in flakes)
Bread-crumbs (Separate the salmon in flakes)
Separate the salmon in flakes and lay them in a sauce made of all the above ingredients mixed together (except the crumbs), to soak for about two hours. Take them up separately and lay them in a scollop tin. Mix the sauce with enough bread-crumbs to give it consistency; cover the fish with it and allow it to brown in the oven.
Water Souchy, Ingredients.
Fish, Perch or Flounders.
This is a scalloped salmon, and the page as printed is a fragment: the ingredient list it refers to ("all the above ingredients") sat above it in the original book and is not reproduced here. What follows fills in the technique, but the proportions have to come from the cook.
- The missing ingredientsThe recipe depends entirely on a list that is not on this page, so no honest conversion is possible. Comparable Victorian scalloped-salmon sauces are built from melted butter or cream, a little vinegar or lemon, made mustard, cayenne and salt — but treat that as an inference, not a reading of the original.
- Flakes means cooked salmonSalmon only separates into flakes once it has been poached or baked, or if it comes from a tin. It reads as a leftover dish, most likely for the cold remains of a cooked salmon; raw fish will not flake and will not cook through in the short browning that follows.
- Keep the soak coldA two-hour soak would have been managed in a cool larder. Do the soaking in the refrigerator, not on the counter, since the fish is already cooked and gets only a surface browning afterwards.
- A scollop tinThis is a shallow shell-shaped tin, or a real scallop shell, used for individual portions. Small gratin dishes or ramekins of about 3–4 in across do the same job; the point is a wide surface for the crumb topping.
- Browning, not bakingThe fish is cooked already, so the oven is only setting and colouring the crumbs. A hot oven, around 425F, for 10 to 15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler with the dishes watched closely.
- Crumb consistency\"Enough bread-crumbs to give it consistency\" means the sauce should hold its shape on a spoon rather than run off the fish. Dry, fine crumbs from stale bread absorb far more than fresh packaged crumbs; add them gradually.
- The stray line at the end\"Water Souchy, Ingredients. Fish, Perch or Flounders\" is the heading of the next recipe in the book, caught by the page break. It has nothing to do with the salmon.
- YieldA pound of cooked salmon fills four small scallop dishes as a first course, or two as a light supper dish.
Scalloped fish belongs to the frugal end of a grand kitchen. A whole boiled salmon was a centrepiece dish, and books of this kind -- written for cooks in staffed households -- often followed a set-piece recipe with instructions for what to do with what came back from the table. The scallop shell, real or in tin imitation, was a common vessel for such reheated fish and shellfish, and it gave the dish its name: to scallop meant to bake in a shell with crumbs, before the word attached itself to sliced potatoes in cream. Cold cooked salmon is bland, and letting the flakes sit in a sharp, mustardy sauce before crumbing was one way of putting the flavour back.