Salmon Puffs
2 cups cooked salmon, fresh or canned Salt and pepper 1/2 cup soft bread-crums I tablespoon lemon-juice 3 eggs Remove the skin and bones from the salmon, chop the meat fine, and add salt, white pepper or paprika, soft bread-crums, lemon-juice or vinegar, and well beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly, and pack in six or eight oiled cups, filling the cups even full. Set the cups at once in a pan containing hot water that comes to about an inch below their tops, and bake for one-half hour. If the oven is very hot, lay a sheet of thick paper over the cups. Turn out upon a hot platter, thrust a sprig of parsley or celery, or a clove, into the center of each puff, and pour about them any good fish sauce.
This is a baked salmon custard in the timbale tradition: the eggs are the only binder, so the water bath and a restrained oven are what keep it tender rather than curdled.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no temperature; its only guidance is the warning about a "very hot" oven and the sheet of paper. A moderate oven, in the range of 325-350F, suits an egg custard, which tends to curdle and weep if pushed much hotter; a cooler oven will want a slightly longer bake.
- The water bath is the hingeSet the filled cups into the hot water before they go in the oven, as written, and keep the water hot but never simmering. Boiling water around the cups drives the outside of the custard past setting while the middle is still liquid.
- CupsSix to eight ordinary ramekins or 4-6 oz custard cups. Oil them well and, if you want clean unmolding, line the bottoms with a disc of parchment.
- The sheet of thick paperThis is a loose cover to shield the tops from radiant heat. A sheet of foil or parchment laid over, not sealed down, does the same job.
- Bread-crumbsSoft crumbs means fresh crumb torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not dried or packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will make the puffs dense.
- DonenessHalf an hour is about right for 4 oz cups, but test rather than time: the center should be just set and register about 170F. Let them stand five minutes before turning out or they will slump.
- SalmonTwo cups of chopped salmon is roughly 10-12 oz of flaked fish, whether cooked fresh or drained from cans. Canned salmon bones are soft and edible if you prefer to mash rather than pick them out, though the recipe directs you to remove them.
- Sauce and yieldSauce -- "Any good fish sauce" is left open; a plain white sauce enriched with butter and lemon, an egg sauce, or hollandaise would all fit the instruction. The recipe gives no yield beyond six to eight puffs.
Salmon puffs belong to the large family of molded egg-and-fish timbales that filled the fish chapters of American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1930s. Canned salmon, cheap and shelf-stable after Pacific canneries scaled up in the later nineteenth century, gave inland households a fish they could keep in the pantry, and cookbook writers responded with many ways to stretch a can into something that looked like a composed dish. The technique here follows French practice: forcemeat bound with egg, baked gently in a water bath, unmolded, and sauced. The garnish instruction, a sprig of parsley or a single clove stuck upright in each puff, is a small period signature.