“Salmon Lane on a Saturday night is very much like any other shopping centre in the more humane quarters of London. Shops and stalls blaze and roar with endeavour. The shops, by reason of their more respectable standing, affect to despise stalls, but when it comes to competition it is usually stalls first and shops hanging round the gate. The place reeks of naphtha, human flesh, bad language, and good-nature. Newly-killed rabbits, with their interiors shamelessly displayed, suspend themselves around the stalls while their proprietors work joyfully with a chopper and a lean-bladed knife. Your earnest shopper is never abroad before nine o'clock in the evening, and many of them have to await the still riper hours when Bill shall have yielded up his wages. Old ladies of the locality are here in plenty, doubtfully fingering the pieces of meat which smother the slabs of the butchers' shops. Little Elsie is here, too, buying for a family of motherless brothers and sisters with the few shillings which Dad has doled out. Who knows so well as Little Elsie the exact spending value of twopence-halfpenny? Observe her as she lays in her Sunday gorge. Two penn'orth of "pieces" from the butcher's to begin with (for twopence you get a bagful of oddments of meat, trimmings from various joints, good nourishing bones, bits of suet, and, if the assistant thinks you have nice eyes, he will throw in some skirt). Then to the large greengrocer's shop for a penn'orth of "specks" (spotted or otherwise damaged fruit, and vegetables of every kind). Of this three penn'orth the most valuable item is the bones, for these, with a bit of carrot and potato and onion, will make a pot of soup sufficient in itself to feed the kiddies for two days. Then, at the baker's, you get a market basket full of stale bread for twopence, and, seeing it's for Sunday, you spend another penny and get five stale cakes. At the grocer's, two ounces of tea, two ounces of margarine, and a penn'orth of scraps from the bacon counter for Dad's breakfast. And there you have a refection for the gods.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
⅓ can salmon 1 quart scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1½ teaspoons salt Few grains pepper Drain oil from salmon, remove skin and bones, rub through a sieve. Add gradually the milk, season, and bind.
Sources: The passage is from Thomas Burke, Nights in London, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Farmer, The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — oxblood cloth, boar stamp.