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Salmon à La Mornay
4 cooked potatoes
1 cup medium white sauce
½ cup Swiss cheese
2 cups boiled salmon or I can
1 egg-yolk salmon
Buttered crums
Mash the potatoes and line a greased baking-dish with them. Add the cheese and egg-yolk to the white sauce and pour half of it over the potatoes. Add the fish and cover it with the remaining sauce and buttered bread-crums. Bake in the oven for twenty minutes.
A gratin of mashed potato, flaked salmon and cheese sauce, written in the compressed style of the period: no oven temperature, no yield, and an ingredient column that the printer's two-column setting has scrambled.
- Reading the garbled ingredient listThe double column has run together. The list is: 4 cooked potatoes, 1 cup medium white sauce, 1/2 cup Swiss cheese, 2 cups boiled salmon or 1 can salmon, 1 egg yolk, buttered crumbs.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the dish is simply reheated and browned: everything in it is already cooked. In modern terms a moderate oven, somewhere around 375-400F, will heat it through and colour the top in twenty minutes.
- Medium white sauceIn period usage this generally means about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk. Thinner than that and the sauce runs off the potato instead of coating the fish.
- The egg yolkTake the sauce off the heat before the yolk goes in, and stir it through off the flame. Adding a raw yolk to a simmering sauce scrambles it, and this is the one step in the recipe that can actually fail.
- Swiss cheeseHalf a cup grated, loosely packed, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 ounces. Gruyere or a genuine Emmental melts smoothly; pre-shredded supermarket "Swiss" is coated with starch and tends to go stringy.
- Canned salmonThe period pack was commonly the tall 1-pound can, which drained comes close to two cups. Modern cans run 6 to 14.75 ounces, so buy by weight rather than by can. Pick out the vertebrae if you like, though the soft bones and skin are edible and were usually left in.
- Buttered crumbsFresh crumbs tossed with melted butter, about 1/2 cup crumbs to 1 tablespoon butter. Dry packaged crumbs absorb nothing and stay pale; toss them and then run the dish briefly under the broiler if the top has not browned.
- YieldServes four as a main course. A 1 1/2-quart baking dish or a 9-inch pie plate holds it well.
Sauce Mornay is a bechamel enriched with grated cheese, usually Gruyere and Parmesan, and often a yolk; the name is generally traced to the nineteenth-century Paris restaurant kitchens, with the Duc de Mornay commonly cited as its honoree, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in an American household book, in a recipe built around a can of salmon and four boiled potatoes, shows how quickly restaurant French entered the American domestic repertoire once canned Pacific salmon became cheap in the decades after the Columbia River canneries scaled up. The dish belongs to a whole family of period suppers in which a modest tin of fish is made respectable by a sauce with a French name and a browned crumb top.