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Escalloped Salmon
1 can salmon 1 C milk 1 T flour 1 T butter 1 C cracker crumbs 2 eggs Salt Pepper Thicken milk with flour and butter, then add salmon (mashed fine), eggs, cracker crumbs and mix thoroughly. Season to taste. Bake 30 min. Mrs. Ruby Trepttow, Mrs. J. F. Wagner.
A church-supper standby written in the shorthand of cooks who already knew what it should look like. The only real decisions left to you are the oven temperature and the size of the can.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is the usual modern reading for a baked dish of this kind; thirty minutes at that heat should set the mixture and colour the top in a shallow baking dish.
- The can of salmonThe standard tall can then held a pound. Modern cans run 14.75 oz (pink or red sockeye, with skin and bone) or 6 oz of boneless pouch-style fish. Use the larger size, and mash the softened bones in rather than picking them out; they are edible and were part of the texture of the original.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda crackers or saltines, crushed, rather than seasoned breadcrumbs. They are the binder here, and coarser crumbs will give a looser, more casserole-like set than finely crushed ones.
- Make the sauce properly"Thicken milk with flour and butter" means a white sauce: melt the tablespoon of butter, cook the flour in it a minute, then whisk in the cup of milk. One tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk is deliberately thin -- the eggs and crumbs do most of the setting.
- Cool before the eggs go inLet the thickened milk drop below scalding before you beat in the eggs, or they will curdle in the bowl and the baked dish will be grainy.
- EggsBeat them first. The instruction to "mix thoroughly" is the whole method: this is a savory custard, and streaks of unbeaten white show up as pale rubbery patches.
- SeasoningCanned salmon is already salted, so season after the salmon is in. A little lemon juice or a spoonful of minced onion would not be out of place, though the original asks for neither.
- YieldFour to six as a luncheon dish, with bread and a salad or stewed tomatoes alongside.
Escalloped salmon belongs to the first generation of American cooking built on the tin can. Canned Pacific salmon became cheap and nationally available in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the time congregational cookbooks like this one were being compiled it was a pantry staple in inland towns that had never seen a fresh salmon. "Escalloped" (a variant spelling of scalloped) had by then loosened from what is traditionally given as its older sense of cooking in a scallop shell to mean almost any dish of something bound with sauce and crumbs and baked, and the same formula was applied to oysters, corn, potatoes and chicken. That this one is signed by two women is typical of the genre: church cookbooks collected recipes as they circulated.