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Salmon Omelet Loaf
One can salmon; pork sausage, 1/4 lb. or more if you wish the sausage to be more prominent. I push the sausage meat from the skins. Crumbs, 1/2 cup; egg beaten, salt and pepper. Blend all these together, and form into a loaf and bake 1/2 hour or more according to heat of the
— Mrs. Chas. R. Ayres
oven.
A church-supper loaf built on two pantry staples, written with the assumption that the cook already knew what a loaf pan and a moderate oven were. The one thing the original leaves dangerously vague is doneness, since raw pork sausage is bound into the mix.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to timeHalf an hour will not reliably bring a loaf of raw pork sausage to a safe center. Bake until a thermometer in the middle reads 160F, which in practice takes 45 to 60 minutes for a loaf of this size.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the original simply tells the cook to judge by the "heat of the oven." For a modern range, treat it as a moderate oven, about 350F.
- "One can salmon"The one-pound tall can was the usual size for canned salmon in this period; today's tall can is 14.75 oz and is the closest match. Drain it, and either pick out the skin and vertebrae or mash them in.
- Sausage from the skinsBulk pork sausage does the same job with less work. If you only have links, slit the casings and push the meat out as directed. Quarter-pound is a mild seasoning presence; six to eight ounces makes it the dominant flavor.
- CrumbsHalf a cup of dry bread crumbs, not panko, which absorbs differently. Soft fresh crumbs work but you may need closer to three-quarters of a cup to bind.
- The eggOne large beaten egg is meant. Two makes a firmer slice if you want it to hold for cold sandwiches the next day.
- Pan and shapingA free-formed loaf on a shallow greased pan browns better; a small loaf tin gives neater slices but sits in its own fat. Either is faithful to the original instruction to "form into a loaf."
- YieldAbout four servings hot, or six as a cold sliced dish. Salt with restraint until you have tasted the salmon, which is packed with salt already.
Canned salmon was the cheap protein of the American home kitchen from roughly the 1880s onward, once Columbia River and Alaskan canneries were shipping in volume and a one-pound can was within reach of most households. Recipes like this one stretched it with a second cheap meat and a handful of crumbs, and the combination of fish and pork sausage, odd to modern taste, was ordinary economy in a household using up what was on the shelf. The Philathea name belongs to the Philathea movement, the young women's Bible-class organization that grew out of American Sunday schools in the 1890s, the Philathea class for young women dating from 1893, though the movement's wider spread came in the early twentieth century; its local classes raised funds by collecting members' recipes, which is why the page carries a contributor's name in the form Mrs. Chas. R. Ayres. Such books were written by cooks for cooks they knew, which explains the shorthand here: no oven temperature, no pan size, and a closing instruction that simply trusts the reader to judge her own stove.