Salmon Surprise
1 cup cream sauce 1 cup mashed potatoes Remove the salmon from the can; place it in a colander and wash under running water. Break into small pieces; mix thoroughly with hot cream sauce and pour into a baking dish. Cover with mashed potatoes and bake until the potatoes are browned.
A canned-salmon shepherd's pie in all but name. The printed ingredient list is incomplete — it gives the sauce and potato but never states the salmon — so treat one standard can as the baseline and scale the toppings to fit.
- Quantity of salmonThe printed list omits the salmon entirely. One 14.75-oz can (or two 6-oz cans) balances 1 cup of sauce and 1 cup of mashed potato in a small baking dish and serves two to three; period tins were not necessarily this size.
- Cream sauceA period cream sauce is a medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Salt and white pepper are assumed; the recipe seasons nothing, so season the sauce firmly.
- Washing the salmonRinsing or draining canned fish appears in period instructions, apparently to reduce the oily, metallic taste of early cans. Modern canned salmon does not need it; draining well is enough, though a brief rinse gives the milder result the recipe seems to intend.
- Skin and bonesCanned salmon still contains soft vertebrae and skin. They are edible and are the reason canned salmon is high in calcium; mash them in or pick them out, but do not leave whole bones in pieces.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Everything goes into the dish already hot, so this is purely a browning job: 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, or 375F if the filling has cooled. A few minutes under the broiler at the end gives the browned top the recipe is after.
- Mashed potato toppingOne cup spread over the salmon is a thin lid, not a thick crust. Keep the potato loose enough to spread without dragging the fish, and dot it with butter so it colors.
- Baking dish sizeUse a shallow 1-quart dish. Depth works against this recipe — a wide, shallow layer gives more browned surface and heats through before the top scorches.
Canned salmon is the point of this recipe. Pacific canneries in British Columbia, Washington and Alaska were shipping tinned sockeye and pink salmon across North America and to Britain in enormous volume by the late nineteenth century, and the tin turned a regional fish into a pantry staple available to inland households year round. Cookbooks of the period responded with dozens of ways to stretch a single can — croquettes, loaves, creamed salmon on toast, and gratins like this one, where a cup of white sauce and a lid of potato make one tin feed a family. The instruction to wash the fish under running water may be a tell of the era: the flavor of early cans is often said to have been assertive enough that some recipe writers told cooks to rinse it off.