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Cutlets
1 cup hot mashed potatoes
Salt and pepper
1 cup flaked salmon
1 teaspoon lemon-juice
Egg and crums
Add potato to salmon. Season with salt, pepper and lemonjuice. Shape into cutlets, egg and crum and fry in deep fat.
A two-ingredient croquette from the leftovers chapter, written in the shorthand of a period cook who was assumed to know what "egg and crum" meant. The whole success of the dish is in the moisture level of the mixture.
- "Egg and crum"A verb phrase, not an ingredient list: roll the shaped cutlets in fine dry breadcrumbs, then beaten egg (thinned with a spoonful of water), then crumbs again. The double coating is what keeps the soft interior from bursting in the fat.
- Flaked salmonThis meant either canned salmon or the remains of a boiled or baked fish. Canned red or pink salmon works directly; drain it hard and pick out skin and the soft vertebrae if you object to them, though the softened bones were often mashed in rather than discarded.
- Keep the potato dryThe hinge of the recipe. Mashed potato made with milk and butter will slump and the cutlets will spread in the fat. Use potato mashed dry, still hot, and let the mixture cool completely before shaping.
- Chill before fryingThe original does not call for it, but thirty minutes in the refrigerator after breading firms the coating and prevents blowouts.
- Cutlet shapeA flattened pear or chop shape, about three-quarters of an inch thick, sometimes with a bit of macaroni stuck in the narrow end to imitate a bone. The word "cutlet" here describes the silhouette, not the cut of meat.
- Deep fat375F. The mixture is already cooked through, so you are only browning the crust: two to three minutes, turning once, then drain on paper. Fat below 350F will soak in; above 400F the crumbs darken before the centre warms.
- YieldAbout six small cutlets, serving two or three as a lunch or supper dish. A cream sauce, egg sauce or a lemon wedge would be a typical accompaniment.
"Made-over dishes" was a standing chapter heading in American household books of this era, and it carried no apology. Cutlets and croquettes were the workhorses of that chapter because breadcrumbs and deep fat disguise the origins of almost anything. Salmon in particular became a pantry staple after Pacific coast canneries scaled up in the late nineteenth century, putting a tin of fish within reach of households far from any coast, and cookbooks of the following decades are thick with recipes designed around it. The shaping into a "cutlet" is the telling detail — a bit of genteel theatre, giving a plate of leftover fish and potato the outline of a chop.