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Salmon Croquettes
1 cup salmon 1/2 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon flour 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon lemon juice Make a cream sauce with the butter, flour, milk, salt and pepper. Put salmon into bowl and add the sauce and lemon juice; mix well with fork until salmon is well broken. Set aside and when cold mold into desired shapes; roll in bread crumbs, then dip in egg (1 egg which has been beaten with 1 tablespoon cold milk), then in bread crumbs. Fry in deep hot fat. Serve with green peas.
A small-batch recipe built on a very stiff cream sauce used as a binder. Everything depends on getting that sauce thick enough and the mixture cold enough to hold a shape in hot fat.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe instruction to "set aside and when cold" is doing the real work. Spread the mixture in a shallow dish and refrigerate at least two hours, ideally overnight; croquettes shaped from warm or barely cool mixture burst and empty into the fat.
- The salmonMost likely canned salmon, the common pantry fish of the period, though the recipe does not say so and leftover poached salmon works equally well. A can of roughly 7-8 oz, drained, gives about a cup. Pick out skin and crush the soft vertebrae or discard them.
- Sauce proportionsOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to half a cup of milk is a thin sauce by modern standards for a croquette binder. Cook it several minutes past the point where it coats the spoon, until it pulls away from the pan in a mass; if the chilled mixture still slumps, work in a spoonful or two of dry crumbs.
- Breading orderThe original crumbs the mixture first, then egg, then crumbs again. The first coating dries the surface so the egg clings, and it is worth following rather than skipping to the usual flour-egg-crumb sequence.
- "Deep hot fat"The original gives no temperature; around 375F is the modern convention for croquettes. Test with a crumb if you have no thermometer: it should brown in well under a minute. Fry two or three at a time so the temperature does not crash, three to four minutes to a deep gold, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
- Resting after breadingGive the coated croquettes 20 minutes back in the refrigerator before frying. This sets the crumb layer and is the second-best defence against blowouts.
- YieldA cup of salmon makes six to eight small cone or cylinder shapes: two modest servings as a main course with the peas, four as a first course.
Croquettes were a fixture of American home cooking from roughly the 1880s through the 1930s, and cookbooks of the period often devote whole sections to them. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived through the same channels as other French kitchen vocabulary in nineteenth-century domestic manuals: a thick béchamel bound to chopped meat, fish or vegetable, shaped, crumbed and deep-fried. Their popularity in the American household owed a great deal to canned salmon, which after the Pacific canneries scaled up in the 1870s and 1880s became a cheap and reliable protein available far from any coast. A recipe like this is essentially a way of turning a can and a half-cup of milk into something that looks like a composed dish, and green peas were a common partner for fried croquettes of this era.