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Creamed Salmon in Rice Timbales
Use rule for Curried Lobster, substituting two cups flaked salmon for lobster meat, and one half cup olives finely chopped for curry.
Line one large mold with cooked rice, fill with creamed salmon, cover top with rice, and steam one half hour. Serve, garnish with individual rice timbales, parsley, and Tomato Cream Sauce.
A composite dish that assumes you have already turned to the Curried Lobster page: that recipe supplies a thick white sauce into which the flaked fish is folded. Here the curry powder is swapped for chopped olives and the whole thing is packed into a rice-lined mold.
- The parent recipe"Use rule for Curried Lobster" means borrowing that recipe's cream base and its method, with the salmon folded in place of the lobster meat; consult that page for the quantities. Build it thick — a loose filling will weep into the rice wall and the mold will collapse when turned out.
- SalmonTwo cups flaked salmon in 1907 would commonly have meant canned red or pink salmon, drained, with skin and the soft vertebrae removed. Cooked fresh salmon works and tastes better, but it flakes into larger pieces and binds less tightly.
- TimbaleA timbale mold is a small straight-sided cup, about 4 to 6 oz. Individual custard cups, dariole molds or a muffin tin stand in. The "one large mold" is unspecified; allow for two cups of fish plus its sauce and a rice lining, and butter it generously so the unmolding is less fraught.
- Lining with riceUse rice cooked soft and slightly sticky, short-grain for preference, and press it firmly up the sides in a layer about half an inch thick while still warm. Cold rice will not adhere to itself and the lining will crack.
- SteamingHalf an hour of steaming sets the filling and heats it through; the mold sits covered, on a rack above simmering water, not in it. Nothing here is raw, so the time is about firmness rather than cooking.
- OlivesHalf a cup of finely chopped olives replaces the curry entirely, so they carry the seasoning. Brined green olives are the likeliest reading — salty and assertive. Taste the sauce before salting it further.
- Tomato Cream SaucePresumably a tomato purée combined with white sauce; see that recipe in the book. Add the tomato to the cream base off the heat and warm gently, or the acid may curdle it.
- YieldA molded dish of this size with its garnish of small timbales suits a small made course rather than a modern main-course portion; the recipe gives no yield.
Molded and creamed fish dishes were the backbone of the American entrée course around 1900, when "entrée" still meant a small made dish served between heavier courses rather than the centerpiece of the meal. Canned salmon made the fish cheap and available inland year-round, and cookbook writers of the period worked hard to dress it up: lined molds, timbale cups, aspics and croustades all served to turn an industrial product into something that looked composed on a platter. The building-block structure here — take the rule for one dish, substitute two ingredients, and you have another — is characteristic of the era's cookery schools, which taught sauces and methods as templates to be varied rather than as fixed recipes. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; like many manufacturer-sponsored books it covers a full household repertoire, with the sponsor's product concentrated in the confectionery and dessert chapters.