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Salmon Croquettes No. 2
1 cup left-over salmon. 1 cup white sauce. 2 egg yolks. 1/2 cup bread crumbs. Season with pepper and salt and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Beat whites stiff, fold in mixture, put into little baking dishes or molds--set in pan of hot water and cook 20 min. Serve with white sauce, with green pepper cut up fine in it.
Sweet potatoes make nice croquettes and puddings.
Almond croquettes with bread sticks can be used as entree.
Despite the name, nothing here is shaped, breaded or fried. This is a baked salmon timbale, lightened with beaten egg white and set in a water bath, and it behaves like a soufflé that has been told to sit still.
- Oven temperatureMrs. Wilson gives none. A custard set in a pan of hot water wants a moderate oven, 350F. Any hotter and the egg curdles at the edges before the centre firms.
- The water bath is the hingePour the hot water so it comes halfway up the moulds, and do not let it boil. Gentle, even heat is the whole reason the mixture stays tender rather than turning to rubbery scrambled egg.
- White sauceA medium bechamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. It must be thick enough to bind, or the moulds will weep. Make a second batch for serving, since the recipe uses all of the first cup in the mixture.
- Left-over salmonFlaked cooked salmon, skin and bones removed. Failing leftovers, a small (about 6-ounce) can, drained, gives roughly the cup called for; larger cans yield considerably more. Press out the liquid or the mixture will be loose.
- Folding the whitesFold the stiff whites into the salmon mixture in two additions, cutting rather than stirring. Overworking here costs you the lift that makes the dish worth the water bath.
- Moulds and timingButtered ramekins or dariole moulds of about 4 to 6 ounces. Twenty minutes suits that size; a single larger dish will need 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre is just set and no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- YieldAbout four to six small moulds depending on their size; enough for four as a light main course.
- The green pepper sauceFine-diced green bell pepper wants a minute or two of softening in butter before it goes into the sauce; added raw it stays squeaky and tastes green against the salmon.
- The last two sentencesThey read as stray notes rather than part of the method for this dish, mentioning sweet potato croquettes and puddings and almond croquettes with bread sticks. Ignore them here.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and built her reputation during the First World War teaching American households to stretch meat, sugar and wheat, and her cookbook carries that thrift into peacetime: this is a recipe whose first ingredient is explicitly a leftover. Canned Pacific salmon, cheap and shelf-stable by the 1910s, had made fish a pantry item in kitchens hundreds of miles from any coast, and it turns up constantly in American cookbooks of the period in croquettes, loaves and timbales. The name is loose usage. A croquette proper is bound, shaped and fried, and Wilson's version is closer to what a professional kitchen would have called a timbale, baked au bain-marie in the French manner.