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Salt (Add sauce to salmon then add)
Add sauce to salmon, then add seasonings. Spread on a plate to cool. Shape, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain.
This is the closing half of a salmon croquette recipe — the binding sauce and its proportions belong to the lines above it, so treat the text as method rather than a complete formula. Everything in it is standard Farmer-era croquette practice, and it works once you supply the missing quantities.
- What the sauce isThe "sauce" is a very thick white sauce (panada) of the usual cooking-school type, butter and flour cooked together and whisked with milk until it holds its shape on the spoon; something on the order of a cup of that sauce to two cups of flaked cooked salmon. The actual proportions are on the lines above this fragment and are not recoverable from what is printed here.
- The hinge: cool it hard"Spread on a plate to cool" is the instruction that decides whether the croquettes hold together. Spread the mixture no more than an inch deep and chill it until genuinely cold and firm — an hour in the refrigerator, longer is better. Warm mixture bursts in the fat.
- SeasoningsThe recipe leaves these open. Salt, white pepper, a little lemon juice, and sometimes a few grains of cayenne or a scrape of onion juice would all suit; chopped parsley is a common addition in salmon croquettes.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsUse dry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and beat the egg with a tablespoon of water so it coats thinly. Chill the breaded croquettes again for fifteen minutes before frying; the coating sets and seals.
- Deep-fat temperatureThe recipe says only "fry in deep fat". Cooking-school books of the period gauged the fat by how fast it browned a cube of bread; for a cooked mixture like this that is a hot fat, roughly the 375-390F range on a modern thermometer. Fry two or three at a time so the temperature does not crash, three to four minutes to a deep brown.
- DrainingThe recipe says only "drain"; brown paper was the usual period surface. A rack over paper works better today, keeping the underside crisp where paper alone steams it.
- SalmonCanned salmon was cheap and widely available by this date and suits the recipe well: it flakes fine and stays moist. Pick out skin and the soft vertebrae discs if you object to them.
- YieldOn the assumed proportions above, roughly eight croquettes, four servings as an entree; green pea sauce or plain drawn butter suits alongside.
Croquettes were the defining entrée of the American cooking-school era: a thick white sauce bound to minced cooked meat or fish, chilled, shaped, crumbed and fried. The technique is French in origin — croquer, to crunch — and it is generally said to have reached wide use in American kitchens through the cooking-school literature of the later nineteenth century, where it solved two problems at once. It used up cooked leftovers, and it produced something that looked deliberately composed on a plate, which mattered in households aspiring to serve courses. Canned salmon, cheap and widely available on the East Coast by the 1890s after the Pacific canneries scaled up, made the salmon version one of the most frequently repeated recipes in the genre. The uniform cylinder or cone shape was a point of pride.