Salmon Loaf
2 Cupfuls Salmon 1 Cupful Cooked Hominy Grits 1 Cupful Bread Crumbs 1 Teaspoon Salt 1/4 Teaspoon Pepper PS 1 Tablespoon Drippings or Salmon Oil 2 Tablespoons Minced Onion Juice and Grated Rind of Half a Lemon 1 Minced Green Pepper 2. Cupfuls of White Sauce i Mix together all ingredients but white sauce. Make sauce as follows: Melt one tablespoonful fat, stir in three tablespoonfuls rice flour, add gradually two cupfuls milk, stirring and cooking until thick. Mix with salmon mixture; turn into a greased bread pan, cover the top with oiled crumbs and bake in moderate oven about forty minutes.
A wartime-style stretched fish loaf: two cans of salmon bound with grits, crumbs and a thick white sauce. It is forgiving, but the sauce does the structural work, so make it properly stiff.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F for about 40 minutes, until the loaf is set and the crumb topping is browned. The centre should reach 145F; a loaf this wet can look done on top while still slack inside.
- How much salmonTwo cupfuls of flaked salmon is roughly one 14-15 oz can, drained, or about 1 lb of cooked fresh salmon. Reserve the oil from the can if you want to use it as the tablespoon of fat, as the recipe suggests.
- Bones and skinPeriod canned salmon was used bones and all, and the soft vertebrae were considered a feature. Mash them in or pick them out according to taste; the skin is best removed.
- Cooked hominy gritsThis means grits already boiled to a stiff porridge and cooled, not dry grits. Cook about 1/4 cup dry grits in water to make a cupful, then let it firm up before mixing, or it will thin the loaf.
- Rice flour in the sauceThree tablespoons of rice flour to two cups of milk makes a binder that sets differently from a wheat-flour one, without the same gluey stretch. Plain wheat flour works in the same quantity; either way cook the sauce until it coats the spoon heavily before it goes into the fish.
- DrippingsSaved beef or bacon fat. Butter or the reserved salmon oil both do the job.
- Oiled crumbsToss fresh breadcrumbs with a tablespoon or so of melted butter or drippings until just coated. Dry crumbs alone can brown too hard or dry out before the loaf is cooked through.
- Bread pan and turning outA standard 9x5 inch loaf tin, well greased. Let the loaf stand 10 minutes before slicing or it will collapse; serve it in the tin if you would rather not risk it.
- YieldSix generous servings. A cream or egg sauce, or simply lemon, is the usual accompaniment, since the loaf itself is mild.
Salmon loaf was one of the great standbys of the American canned-goods era. Canned Pacific salmon became cheap and ubiquitous from the 1880s onward, and cookery writers and home economists promoted it hard as a protein that kept without ice and needed no fishmonger. Bridal and household manuals of the period leaned on loaves and croquettes precisely because they turned one tin into a family dinner: the fish is extended with a starch, bound with white sauce, and baked in the bread pan every kitchen already owned. The hominy grits here point south, or at least to a thrift-minded household using up leftover breakfast porridge; other versions of the same formula call for rice, mashed potato or cracker crumbs interchangeably.