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Salmon Croquettes
1¾ cups cold flaked salmon 1 cup Thick White Sauce Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon lemon juice
This is the filling for croquettes rather than a finished dish: cooked salmon bound with a very stiff white sauce, chilled hard, shaped, breaded and fried. Everything depends on the sauce being thick enough and the mixture cold enough.
- The salmon quantityThe amount as printed has lost its fraction and cannot be read with certainty; the proportion in comparable croquette mixtures is about 1 3/4 cups of flaked fish to 1 cup of thick sauce. Judge by feel: the mass should hold a shape on the spoon, not slump.
- Thick White SauceA heavy binding sauce rather than a pouring one; thick white sauces of this type are commonly about 1/4 cup butter and 1/4 cup flour to 1 cup of milk, cooked until stiff enough to mound. An ordinary pouring bechamel will leave croquettes that burst in the fat.
- Cold flaked salmonLeftover poached salmon or drained canned salmon both work; pick out skin and the soft vertebrae if you object to them. Blot the fish dry, since surplus liquid loosens the binding.
- Chill before shapingSpread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate until firm, at least an hour. Warm mixture will not hold a cylinder or cone and is the usual cause of failure.
- Crumb, egg, crumbRoll the shaped croquettes in fine dry crumbs, then in egg beaten with a little water, then in crumbs again, and let them stand a few minutes so the coating sets.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no frying directions; for deep fat, around 375F browns croquettes of this size in a minute or two. Cooler fat lets them soak; hotter fat colours the crust before the centre is hot.
- SeasoningA few grains of cayenne means a scant pinch, and the lemon juice should go in at the end, off the heat, so it stays bright. Salt to taste, remembering that canned salmon is already salted.
- YieldRoughly six to eight croquettes, depending on the size shaped; a small entree serving for three or four.
Croquettes were a standard American answer to cooked fish or meat left from an earlier meal, and by the end of the nineteenth century they were a fixture of the entree course in cooking-school teaching, drilling two lessons at once: a properly thickened white sauce and deep-fat frying. Canned salmon from the Pacific coast canneries was cheap and widely available in this period, including in households far from any coast. The page as it survives gives only the ingredient list; the general croquette method was commonly set out once elsewhere in such manuals and referred back to.