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Salmon Force-meat
1 egg 2 tablespoons melted butter ½ cup soft stale bread crumbs ½ cup cold flaked salmon 2 tablespoons cream ½ teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Cook milk and bread crumbs ten minutes, add salmon chopped and rubbed through a sieve; then add cream, egg slightly beaten, melted butter, salt, and pepper.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in itself: a stiff salmon paste that gets shaped into small balls and poached in the soup or in salted water. The printed measurements in this entry have suffered in transcription, and one ingredient appears only in the method.
- The quantitiesThe printed page was checked: the crumbs and salmon are a half cup each, and the salt a half teaspoon, as our text now gives. Adjust by feel as you mix; the force-meat should hold its shape on a spoon.
- Milk is missing from the listThe method opens "Cook milk and bread crumbs ten minutes," but no milk is quantified. Use just enough to make a thick panada with the crumbs — roughly a third of a cup to a half cup of crumbs — and cook it down until it leaves the side of the pan.
- Force-meat means dumplingForce-meat here is a garnish paste, not a stuffing to be baked or fried -- mixtures of this kind were generally shaped into small balls and poached in soup or salted water, though this entry gives no instruction for shaping or cooking. Simmer them briefly, until they firm, and add to a milk-based soup.
- Skip the sieveRubbing cooked salmon through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth paste in a kitchen without machinery. A food processor does it in fifteen seconds; pulse rather than run it, or the fish turns gluey.
- Cold flaked salmonCanned salmon was widely available and works well, bones and skin removed. Leftover poached or roasted fillet is equally fine, but drain it well -- wet fish makes a paste that will not hold together in the pot.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil breaks the balls apart before the egg has set. Keep the liquid at a bare tremble.
- YieldNot given. On the reduced quantities suggested above, roughly two dozen small balls, enough to garnish six to eight bowls of soup.
Force-meat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of an English mangling in which the modern verb force is generally held to play no part — covered any pounded, bound mixture of meat or fish used as stuffing, garnish or dumpling. Fannie Farmer's soup chapters are full of these small additions: custard cut in dice, egg balls, marrow balls, fish quenelles, all of them ways to give body and interest to a soup made without stock. The salmon version reflects the late-nineteenth-century American pantry, where canned Pacific salmon had become widely available after the Columbia River canneries scaled up in the 1870s and 1880s. A cook with a can, some stale bread and an egg could produce something that read as French on a menu.