Home › Entrées and Made-Over Dishes › Salmon Croquettes
Salmon Croquettes
1¾ cups cooked salmon, fresh Salt and pepper or canned
Cayenne
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon lemon-juice
1/3 cup flour
Egg and crums
1 cup milk
Make a white sauce with the fat, flour and milk. Add salt, a little white pepper, and a few grains of cayenne. To this cream foundation add cold flaked salmon and lemon-juice. Spread on a plate to cool. Shape, dip in fine crums, roll in egg and again in crums and fry in deep fat.
A standard croquette formula: a very stiff white sauce used as binder, chilled hard, then breaded and deep-fried. Everything depends on how cold the mixture is when you shape it.
- Chill it properly"Spread on a plate to cool" is best read as spread thin and left until firm all through; in a modern kitchen that means the refrigerator, and several hours does no harm. A mixture that is merely cool will burst in the fat and leave you with a pan of salmon soup.
- The flour is not a typoHalf a cup of flour to one cup of milk makes a panada, not a pouring sauce — it should come together as a stiff paste that pulls from the pan. The 2 tablespoons of butter is low against that much flour by modern proportions; 4 tablespoons gives a smoother, less pasty binder.
- "Crums"Dried fine breadcrumbs, sieved — not the coarse panko sold today. Stale bread dried in a low oven and rolled fine is closest to what was meant.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe order given is deliberate and still the better method: the first light coat of crumbs gives the beaten egg something to grip, so the shell seals. Beat the egg with a tablespoon of water to thin it.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives none. A period test for cooked mixtures like this was a cube of bread browning in about 40 seconds, roughly 375-390F. Fry in small batches, two to three minutes, turning once; drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
- Canned salmonThen as now, canned salmon carries soft vertebrae and skin. Some cooks mashed them in; pick them out if the texture bothers you, and drain the fish well or the mixture will slacken.
- Cayenne and white pepper"A few grains" is a scant pinch; cayenne here is for warmth behind the fish, not heat you can name. White pepper, called for in the method, leaves no dark flecks in the pale interior.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, serving four as a light main course. Cone or cylinder shapes were the period standard; a rounded patty fries more evenly.
Croquettes belong to the "made-over dishes" tradition — the household art of turning yesterday's cooked fish, fowl or meat into something that looked like a fresh dish. Salmon was an especially common candidate in the early twentieth century because canned Pacific salmon had become one of the cheapest reliable proteins in the American pantry, shipped inland from Columbia River and Alaskan canneries and stocked in kitchens that were nowhere near a coast. The technique itself is French: a thick sauce liaison bound with flour, chilled and fried, is what separates a croquette from a fishcake, and American domestic-science teaching of the 1890s and 1900s drilled the white-sauce foundation as a skill to be learned once and applied to a dozen dishes. The odd spelling "crums" turns up in cookbooks of the period, though "crumbs" was the more common printed form.