Home › Soups Without Stock › Salmon Soup
Salmon Soup
1/3 can salmon 1 quart scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1½ teaspoons salt Few grains pepper Drain oil from salmon, remove skin and bones, rub through a sieve. Add gradually the milk, season, and bind. 1
A plain milk-based fish soup of the sort Fannie Farmer grouped under "soups without stock" — a thin white sauce carrying puréed canned salmon. The instructions assume you already know how to make that sauce.
- "Bind" means make a white sauce"Bind" means thicken with the butter and flour -- The recipe never says what to do with them. Farmer's order is to add the scalded milk gradually to the sieved salmon, season, and then thicken; if you prefer, cook butter and flour together into a roux without colouring and use it to bind the soup. Heat through but do not boil hard once the fish is in.
- How much salmonThe standard American salmon can of the period was a one-pound tall can, so a third of one is roughly 5 ounces including its liquid, rather less once drained. A modern 6-oz can is close enough; use the whole thing.
- "Drain oil from salmon"Canned salmon was and is packed in its own liquid and oil, not olive oil. Drain it off — it will make the soup greasy and dull the flavour.
- Skin and bonesThe soft vertebrae in canned salmon are edible and are the reason the stuff is a calcium source, but they are gritty in a smooth soup. Farmer's instruction to remove them and sieve the flesh still gives the better texture; a food processor or immersion blender does the job faster.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to about 180F, when it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. Scalding is generally explained as a way of dealing with souring organisms and enzymes in unpasteurised milk; with pasteurised milk it mainly speeds the soup to temperature.
- SaltCanned salmon carries its own salt, so a teaspoon and a half may be more than the soup needs. Season at the end and taste first.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the fish makes about five cups — four modest bowls as a first course. Serve at once; on standing it thickens and a skin forms.
Canned salmon was one of the transformative pantry goods of the late nineteenth century. Commercial canneries on the Columbia River and in Alaska sent cheap tinned fish east from the 1870s onward, and by the time the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896 a can of salmon was a staple of the ordinary household store cupboard, reliable and available inland year-round. That is why this soup sits in the chapter on soups made without stock: it needs no bones, no long simmering and no butcher, only milk, flour, butter and a tin. The technique — fish or vegetable purée let down with a milk-thickened base — is the same one behind the cream soups and bisques a few pages away, and it reflects Fannie Farmer's method of teaching a handful of reusable formulas rather than a long list of unrelated dishes. Her white sauce, learned once, produced a dozen suppers.