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Moulded Salmon Salad (Use a pound of salmon)
Use a pound of salmon, fresh-cooked or canned.
Remove skin and bone, and pick the flesh fine with a silver fork. Mix half a teaspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of sugar, a teaspoonful of flour, half a teaspoonful of mustard, and a dash of paprica.
Over these pour very gradually three-fourths a cup of hot milk and stir and cook over hot water ten minutes, then add one-fourth a cup of hot vinegar and two tablespoonfuls of butter creamed and mixed with the beaten yolks of two eggs; stir until the egg is set, then add one level tablespoonful of granulated gelatine, softened in one-fourth a cup of cold water, and strain over the salmon; mix thoroughly, and turn into a mould. When chilled. serve with Cream Salad Dressing (page 27), to which half a cucumber, chopped fine and drained, has been added. Reserve a part of the dressing, omitting the cucumber, and use with slices of cucumber as a garnish. To prepare the cucumber, pare with a handy slicer and cut from it a section three-fourths an inch thick; pare this round and round very thin and roll loosely to form a cup.
Dispose this on the top of the fish and fill with dressing. (Use a pastry bag and tube.) Cut the rest of the cucumber in thin slices.
A boiled-dressing custard set with gelatine, folded into flaked salmon and turned out of a mould. The base is essentially a cooked salad dressing, and it behaves like one.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilThe flour-thickened milk, then the egg yolks, then the vinegar all go over hot water rather than direct heat for a reason. Once the yolks are in, keep the water below a simmer and stir constantly; a boil curdles it and no amount of straining will bring it back smooth.
- Add the vinegar last, and hotAdd the vinegar hot, and only after the milk has thickened -- The instruction is deliberate. Acid poured into cold or unthickened milk will curdle it; going in hot, after the starch has cooked and set the milk, it holds together. Cider or white wine vinegar both work.
- A pound of salmonTwo 7.5-oz cans or one 14.75-oz can, drained, come close; or a pound of cooked fresh salmon, flaked. Modern canned salmon has soft, fully edible bones and skin; picking them out is optional and mostly cosmetic.
- The silver forkNot affectation. Ordinary steel of the period reacted with acid and fish and left a metallic taint. Any stainless fork now does the job.
- Granulated gelatineOne level tablespoon is somewhat more than one modern envelope (about 7 g / 1/4 oz), which sets roughly 2 cups of liquid firmly enough to unmould. Bloom it in the quarter cup of cold water for five minutes before stirring it into the hot custard.
- Moulding and chillingOil or spray a 3- to 4-cup mould lightly. It needs at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better; unmould by dipping the base in warm water for a few seconds.
- Salting the cucumber"Chopped fine and drained" is doing real work. Salt the chopped cucumber for fifteen minutes and press out the liquid, or the dressing will thin and weep on the plate within the hour.
- Cream Salad DressingThe page-27 dressing is not given here; from the name it is presumably a cooked or boiled dressing lightened with cream. Mayonnaise thinned with a little cream and a squeeze of lemon stands in acceptably.
- YieldServes six as a first course or light lunch, four as a main salad.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties came out of the Boston Cooking School orbit at the turn of the twentieth century, when moulded fish salads were the height of respectable entertaining and canned salmon was cheap and widely available. Pacific Northwest canneries had been shipping tinned salmon east in quantity since the 1870s and 1880s, which is why the recipe can shrug and say "fresh-cooked or canned" without further comment. Commercially packaged granulated gelatine, sold in pre-measured quantities rather than as sheets or calf's-foot stock the cook had to boil down herself, reached American kitchens toward the end of the century and made this kind of dish practical for a household without a staff. The elaborate garnish, a pared cucumber ring rolled into a cup and piped full of dressing, belongs squarely to the period's conviction that a cold dish earned its place at table by looking constructed.