Fish Loaf
1/2 Cups Fish Finely Flaked (1 can Salmon may be used) or any white meat fish is good Seasonings 1 Cup Stale Bread Crumbs 2 Well Beaten Eggs 1/2 Cup Milk Tomato Sauce or Vegetable Cream Sauce Combine the fish, bread crumbs, eggs and milk. Season with salt, pepper, parsley (finely chopped) and lemon juice. Fill a greased bread pan or mould. Steam or bake thirty minutes. Serve with the hot tomato sauce, or the cream sauce in which may be cooked any left over vegetables, such as peas, carrots, string beans or asparagus.
A thrift-era mould loaf that depends on the ratio of fish to binder rather than on precise weights. The proportions as printed are slightly garbled, so read the quantities before you start.
- The "1/2 Cups" is almost certainly 1 1/2A single cup of breadcrumbs, two eggs and half a cup of milk will swamp half a cup of fish. One 14.75 oz can of salmon, drained, yields roughly a cup and a half of flaked meat, which is what the parenthetical points to. Treat 1 1/2 cups as the intended figure.
- Bake at 350FThe original gives no temperature at all, and none of the usual oven terms appear on the page; 350F is a reasonable modern setting, and thirty minutes at that heat sets a loaf of this size through. Test the centre at 145F if you want certainty.
- Steaming versus bakingSteamed in a covered mould set in simmering water, the loaf stays pale, moist and close-textured; baked uncovered it browns and firms at the edges. Steamed in a full bread pan it may need longer than the thirty minutes given.
- Canned salmonPeriod canned salmon came with the skin and softened vertebrae included, and the bones are soft enough to mash into the mixture. Modern skinless boneless packs are fine but drier; keep a spoonful of the packing liquid if the mixture looks stiff.
- Stale bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs from day-old bread, not the sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs. Dried crumbs absorb the milk and hold the loaf together; fresh crumbs will make it wetter, so hold back some of the milk if that is all you have.
- Grease and line the panA fish loaf sticks. Butter the pan and lay a strip of parchment along the bottom and up the ends so you can lift the loaf out whole, then rest it five minutes before turning out or it will crack.
- Seasoning is left to you"Seasonings" means about a teaspoon of salt, a good grind of pepper, two tablespoons of chopped parsley and a tablespoon of lemon juice for this quantity. Canned salmon is already salty, so season lightly and adjust after cooking.
- YieldA standard bread pan of this mixture serves four as a main course with sauce and a vegetable, or six sliced cold. Leftovers slice more cleanly the next day.
The fish loaf belongs to the early twentieth-century domestic-science kitchen, where a bound and moulded mixture was considered both economical and refined: it stretched a can of salmon with bread and eggs, sliced neatly at table, and could be dressed up with a sauce. Canned Pacific salmon was cheap and widely distributed by the 1900s, and cookbooks of the period lean on it heavily for exactly this kind of dish. The instruction to fold leftover peas, carrots, beans or asparagus into the cream sauce shows how the dish works — the loaf itself is the lesson, and the sauce is where yesterday's vegetables quietly go.