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Salmon Box
Line a bread pan, slightly buttered, with warm steamed rice. Fill the centre with coid boiled salmon, flaked, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and a slight grating of nutmeg. Cover with rice and steam one hour. Turn on a hot platter for serving, and pour around Egg Sauce II.
A moulded loaf of cooked rice and cooked salmon, steamed only long enough to set into a shape that will turn out whole. Everything in it is already cooked, so the hour of steaming is about cohesion, not doneness.
- The hinge: pack it tightThe loaf holds together because the warm rice is pressed firmly against the sides and over the top with the back of a wet spoon, leaving no air pockets. Loosely spooned rice will collapse the moment you invert it.
- "Bread pan"A loaf pan; nineteenth-century bread pans varied in size, so anything in the region of a modern 8.5 x 4.5 inch pan will do. Butter it well and, for insurance, line the bottom with a strip of parchment so the turn-out is clean.
- Quantities, which the recipe omitsAbout 3 cups cooked rice (1 cup raw) and a pound of flaked cooked salmon will roughly fill a loaf pan at about two parts rice to one of fish. Canned salmon, well drained and picked over, will serve in place of the cold boiled fish, though tin sizes then were not those on the shelf today.
- How to steam itCover the pan tightly with buttered parchment or foil, set it on a rack in a deep kettle with simmering water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep the lid on. A moderate oven with the pan in the same water bath will also set the loaf, though the recipe calls only for steaming.
- TimingAn hour is generous for ingredients that are already cooked; 35-45 minutes is enough to heat the loaf through and firm the rice. Longer only dries the salmon.
- Turning outLet the pan stand 5 to 10 minutes off the heat before inverting, so the loaf settles and pulls slightly from the sides. Run a thin knife around the edge first.
- Egg Sauce IIFarmer's egg sauces are butter-and-flour sauces (white sauce or drawn butter) with hard-cooked egg added; check the book's Egg Sauce II for the exact form, as it differs from Egg Sauce I. Make it while the loaf steams and keep it warm over hot water.
- NutmegA "slight grating" means slight. Nutmeg with fish reads oddly now, but it turns up as a fish seasoning in nineteenth-century American cookbooks; more than a few rasps will take over the dish.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course, cut into thick slices across the loaf.
Moulded fish loaves like this one belong to the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for shaping food, part of a broader interest in making leftovers presentable at table: cold boiled salmon from a previous meal, encased in rice, reappears as a whole dish with a sauce poured round it. Salmon was also one of the first foods successfully canned on a commercial scale in the United States, with Pacific coast canneries shipping east in quantity by the 1880s, so a Boston cook in 1896 could reach for either the remains of a poached fish or a tin. The pairing of salmon with egg sauce is older still and strongly associated in New England with the Fourth of July, when salmon, new peas and boiled potatoes made the traditional holiday dinner.