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Salmon a La Mornay
4 cooked potatoes 1/2 cup Swiss cheese 1 egg-yolk Buttered crums 1 cup medium white sauce 2 cups boiled salmon or 1 can salmon Mash the potatoes and line a greased baking-dish with them. Add the cheese and egg-yolk to the white sauce and pour half of it over the potatoes. Add the fish and cover it with the remaining sauce and buttered bread-crums. Bake in the oven for twenty minutes.
A 1920s gratin built on mashed potato rather than pastry or rice, with the cheese sauce doing all the work. The recipe assumes a cook who knows her sauces, so a few gaps need filling.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so this is a browning job: 400F for the stated twenty minutes will heat it through and colour the crumbs. At 350F it will need closer to thirty and the top may stay pale.
- The egg yolkThis is the step that can spoil the dish. Take the white sauce off the heat, stir a spoonful into the beaten yolk, then return the mixture to the pan. Adding the yolk directly to a simmering sauce will curdle it into threads.
- Medium white sauceIn this period that means roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk -- thick enough to coat but still pourable. A thin sauce will sink into the potatoes and leave the fish dry.
- Swiss cheeseHalf a cup grated is about 2 ounces. Gruyere is closer to what a Mornay expects than modern mild supermarket Swiss.
- Canned salmonThe standard tall can of this period held about 1 lb, close to the 2 cups of flaked fish given as the alternative, though smaller half-pound flats were also sold. If you can only find small cans, use two 6- to 7-oz tins. Drain well, and crush or discard the soft vertebrae and skin as you prefer -- both are edible.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1/2 cup crumbs to 1 tablespoon butter. Dry packaged crumbs colour much faster and may darken before the dish is hot through.
- The potato liningMash while still warm with a little butter and milk or the layer will be stiff and crumbly. Press it up the sides of the dish as a shell, not just across the bottom.
- YieldServes four as a main course in a 1 1/2-quart dish. Let it stand five minutes before serving so the sauce sets enough to cut.
Mornay is a béchamel enriched with grated cheese and often an egg yolk, and it turns up across the French repertoire on fish, eggs and vegetables; the name is traditionally linked to the 16th-century Huguenot statesman Philippe de Mornay, though the attribution is folklore rather than record and the sauce itself is a 19th-century Parisian invention. Its appearance here shows how thoroughly the classical sauces had been domesticated for American home cooks by the 1920s -- paired not with fresh poached salmon but with a can of it, and set on mashed potato instead of a pastry case. Canned Pacific salmon was cheap, shelf-stable and heavily promoted in that decade, and dressing it in a French sauce was a standard way of lifting a pantry staple to company standard.