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Salt and Cayenne (Shred the raw salmon)
Shred the raw salmon and the two anchovies, pound them in a mortar, and rub them through a hair-sieve. Put the butter and flour into a stewpan, and mix well together over the fire; add the white sauce, and stir till it thickens and the flour is cooked. Now put this sauce and the salmon into a mortar with the spawn, salt, cayenne, three eggs added one at a time, and the whipped cream ; pound all well together. Butter your mould, put in the mixture, cover with a buttered paper, and steam very gently for about three-quarters of an hour. Turn it out on to a hot dish, and serve with any good fish sauce poured over it.
This is a steamed salmon mousse of the classic type — a pounded fish forcemeat bound with a thick panada, eggs and cream. The printed text here is only the method; the quantities belonged to an ingredient list that has not carried over, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than as the author's own figures.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe as it stands names butter, flour, white sauce, spawn and whipped cream without amounts; only the eggs are numbered, at three. A workable ratio for a mousse of this style is roughly equal weights of raw salmon and thick sauce, but the original numbers are genuinely lost and any conversion, the cream included, is a reconstruction.
- The hinge: cold and fineEverything depends on the mixture staying cold and being worked absolutely smooth. Warm fish and warm panada will break when the cream goes in, and any sinew left unsieved shows as a thread in the finished mousse. Chill the cooked sauce fully before pounding it with the fish.
- Mortar and hair-sieveA food processor does the pounding in under a minute; work in short bursts so the friction does not warm the mixture. The hair-sieve is a fine drum sieve (tamis) — push the purée through with a plastic scraper, which catches the pin bones and connective tissue the machine leaves behind.
- White sauceHere it most likely means a bechamel-type white sauce. The butter-and-flour step followed by "add the white sauce" is thickening an already-made sauce into a stiff panada; cook it two or three minutes past the point where it thickens so the flour loses its raw taste.
- "The spawn"In Victorian and Edwardian fish cookery "spawn" often means lobster coral, the dark roe that turns scarlet on cooking and was pounded in for colour and flavour; in a salmon dish it may equally mean salmon roe. Either way it is a colouring and seasoning element, not structural, and can be left out.
- Steaming the mouldButter a charlotte mould or terrine, fill it no more than three-quarters full, cover with buttered paper or foil, and set it in a covered steamer over barely trembling water, as the recipe directs. A modern substitute is a roasting tin of hot water in a low oven, around 300-325F, though the book itself gives no oven temperature. "Very gently" is the operative phrase -- a hard boil curdles the eggs and the mousse weeps.
- DonenessThree-quarters of an hour would suit a mould of perhaps a pint and a half, though the recipe specifies no size. Judge it by a centre reading of 160F and by a skewer that comes out clean; let it stand five minutes before turning out or it will crack.
- Sauce and yield"Any good fish sauce" of the period could mean a veloute made with fish stock, a shrimp or lobster sauce, or a Dutch sauce (hollandaise). The yield depends on the mould, whose size the recipe does not give.
Pounded fish mousses and quenelles were a proving ground of the professional kitchen in the late nineteenth century: they demanded a strong arm, a good mortar and a cook patient enough to force everything through a hair-sieve, and their smoothness was a visible measure of skill. Salmon was a favoured fish for this treatment, both for its flavour and because the pale pink puree, deepened with coral, turned out of the mould as a solid block of colour on the dish. The technique descends from French haute cuisine -- a farce fine bound with a flour panada -- and appears in books of "high class" cookery aimed at cooks in large private households, where such a mousse might be served as an entree. The dish survives in restaurant kitchens as a terrine or mousseline, while it has largely dropped out of home cooking.