Cream Sauce
Prepare a small cupful of cream sauce, in which had been stirred a teaspoonful of minced parsley and the juice of onefourth of a lemon. Pour over the salmon and serve. Garnish with parsley. The choicest portion of the salmon is that at the center and toward the tail.
This is the finishing sauce for a poached or baked salmon rather than a standalone dish, and it assumes the reader already knows how to build a cream sauce — a knowledge the book takes for granted. The essentials are the ratio and the order in which the acid goes in.
- What "cream sauce" means hereA basic white sauce; a typical period proportion is about 1 tablespoon butter melted, 1 tablespoon flour cooked in it for a minute without browning, then 1 cup of cream or rich milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt and white pepper. The recipe itself gives no proportions.
- A small cupfulRead it as a little under a cup, roughly 200-240 ml.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatAdd the lemon late -- The juice of a quarter lemon is roughly 2 teaspoons to a tablespoon. Acid can curdle a hot dairy sauce, so it is safer to take the pan off the burner, let it stop bubbling, then stir in the juice and the parsley together.
- ParsleyA teaspoonful minced means flat-leaf or curly, finely chopped, added at the end so it stays green. Chopping it dry rather than wet keeps it from clumping in the sauce.
- The salmon itselfThe recipe gives no cooking instruction, presumably because the fish was dealt with elsewhere in the book. Poach or bake until just done; official guidance for fish is an internal 145F, while many modern cooks pull salmon lower for a moister center. Salmon held until it flakes readily throughout will be dry under any sauce.
- On the cutThe claim that the center and tail end are choicest reflects a whole fish bought in the round. From a modern fillet, the thicker loin end cooks more evenly and the thin tail end overcooks first — start checking it early.
- ServingSpoon the sauce over the fish at the table rather than letting it sit; a flour-thickened cream sauce forms a skin within a few minutes. If it must wait, cover the surface directly with buttered paper.
Cream sauce of this kind is the household descendant of French béchamel, and by the late nineteenth century it had become the default American treatment for boiled or baked fish — cheap, forgiving, and a way of making a mild-flavored piece of fish look finished. The brevity of the entry is itself a period detail. A book of this sort could assume its reader had already worked through the sauce chapter and needed only the trimmings, so the fish section supplies just the flavoring.