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Fish Loaf
2 cups cooked fish or 1 can fish 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 cup thick white sauce Drain the fish and tear into small bits. Add the salt, the beaten egg-yolks, the white sauce, and the beaten egg-whites. Pour into a greased baking-dish and bake for twenty or thirty minutes.
A plain fish soufflé-loaf built on a thick white sauce, of the kind that turned up leftover boiled fish or a can of salmon into a supper dish. The original gives no oven temperature and no pan size, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified anywhere in the recipe. Bake at 350F. Anything hotter sets the outside before the egg-bound centre has cooked and the loaf will crack and weep.
- Thick white sauceOne cup thick white sauce means roughly 2 tablespoons butter with 3 to 4 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon heavily. A pourable sauce will not hold the loaf together.
- Cool the sauce firstLet the sauce drop below hand-warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks.
- The hinge: fold the whitesThe beaten whites are the only lift in the dish. Fold them in with a spatula in a few strokes, keeping them visible, and get the pan into the oven at once.
- Canned fish"1 can fish" of the era usually meant a 1-lb tall can of salmon, closer to 2 cups drained than a modern 6-oz tin. Use about 2 cups of flaked fish however you get there, and pick out skin and heavy bones from salmon unless you want them mashed in.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt plus canned fish is generous; salt lightly and taste the sauce instead. Lemon juice, pepper, and a little chopped parsley or dill are worth adding, as the recipe as printed is very bland.
- Pan and donenessA greased 1-quart dish or small loaf pan. Twenty to thirty minutes is right for a shallow dish; a deeper loaf pan wants 40 minutes or more. It is done when the centre is set and springs back, not when it merely looks brown.
- Yield and servingServes three or four. Turn it out or spoon it from the dish and pass more white sauce; capers, chopped egg, or tomato suit it, since the loaf itself is dry.
Bound loaves like this one were a staple of American "made dish" cookery from roughly the 1880s through the 1930s: a starch-thickened sauce, an egg or two, and whatever protein was left from an earlier meal, baked until it would hold a slice. Canned salmon, cheap and shelf-stable after the Pacific canneries scaled up in the late nineteenth century, made a fish loaf possible in kitchens nowhere near the coast, and it was a common Friday or Lenten supper. The lack of a stated oven temperature is characteristic of the era, when heat was often judged by hand and habit rather than by a dial.