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Mock Lobster
1½ cups salmon, 1 cup tomatoes, 2 tbsp. cracker crumbs, 1 tbsp. butter, salt, pepper or paprika. Cook ten minutes in double boiler.
— Mrs. Chester W
— Doten
A three-line church-supper recipe that assumes you know what its ingredients look like out of the tin. The hinge is that nothing here is raw, so the ten minutes is about thickening and marrying flavors, not cooking.
- The salmon is cannedIn a 1900s community cookbook, unqualified "salmon" in a dish like this almost certainly means tinned salmon, drained and flaked. A standard modern can gets you to roughly the 1 1/2 cups called for; pick out the vertebrae if you like, though the soft bones and skin were commonly mashed in.
- The tomatoes tooA cup of canned tomatoes, broken up with their juice, is most likely what is meant. Fresh tomatoes will work but are wetter, so the mixture may need a few extra minutes to tighten.
- Cracker crumbs are the thickenerTwo tablespoons of crushed soda or common crackers absorb the tomato liquid and bind the whole into a spoonable mass. Panko will not do the same job; use plain saltines or unseasoned dry breadcrumbs.
- Double boiler, and whyA bowl or pan set over simmering water. It keeps the tomato from scorching and the mixture from breaking up over harsh direct heat, which is presumably why the recipe specifies it rather than a pan on the stove.
- Ten minutes is enoughBoth main ingredients are fully cooked already. Longer over the water only dries the fish and turns the mixture pasty. Stir once or twice and stop when it holds its shape on the spoon.
- Season at the endCanned salmon and canned tomatoes both carry salt, so taste before adding any. The recipe offers pepper or paprika; paprika was in wide use in American cookery of the period, and it lends a pink-orange tint that suits the "lobster" conceit.
- Yield and servingAround two and a half cups, enough for four small portions. Serve hot on buttered toast points or in patty shells, or chill it and use it as a sandwich filling.
"Mock" dishes were a long-standing fixture of American cookery, carried over from an English tradition already established by the eighteenth century — mock turtle soup, mock duck, mock cherry pie — and they persisted into the 1930s. They rarely claimed to fool anyone, and instead promised the general effect of an expensive thing at everyday cost. Lobster was a fashionable chafing-dish luxury in this era, usually served creamed or Newburg-style on toast, and the pink flesh and paprika blush of canned salmon in tomato was close enough to stand in for it. Canned Pacific salmon was the point: by the 1890s the Columbia River and Alaska canneries had made it one of the cheapest protein sources in the country, cheap enough that a church-society cookbook like this one could build a company dish around it.