Salmon Puffs
2 cups cooked salmon, fresh or I/2 cup soft bread-crums
½ cup soft bread-crums canned
1 tablespoon lemon-juice
Salt and pepper
3 eggs
Remove the skin and bones from the salmon, chop the meat fine, and add salt, white pepper or paprika, soft bread-crums, lemonjuice or vinegar, and well beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly, and pack in six or eight oiled cups, filling the cups even full. Set the cups at once in a pan containing hot water that comes to about an inch below their tops, and bake for one-half hour. If the oven is very hot, lay a sheet of thick paper over the cups. Turn out upon a hot platter, thrust a sprig of parsley or celery, or a clove, into the center of each puff, and pour about them any good fish sauce.
A baked egg-and-fish custard, closer to a timbale than anything we would now call a puff. The ingredient column has come through the scanner scrambled — the bread-crumb line is duplicated and the word "canned" has drifted out of place — but the working list is 2 cups cooked salmon (fresh or canned), 1/2 cup soft bread crumbs, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 3 eggs, salt and pepper.
- The hinge: gentle heatThis is a custard, and the water bath is not optional. Baked too hot, the eggs curdle and weep and the puffs will not turn out cleanly. Set the oven at 325-350F and keep the water in the pan hot but never simmering.
- "Oiled cups"Straight-sided custard cups or small ramekins, brushed with oil or softened butter. The mixture comes to about three cups, so roughly 3-4 oz per cup if divided among six or eight. Filling them level full is deliberate — the mixture rises very little, and a half-filled cup gives a squat puff that is hard to unmold.
- The sheet of thick paperA heat shield against a fierce coal oven, keeping the tops from browning before the centers set. Foil or a sheet of parchment laid loosely over the cups does the same job in a modern oven.
- Timing and donenessHalf an hour is right for small cups at 325-350F, but judge by set rather than clock: the center should be just firm to a light touch and a knife inserted at the edge should come out clean. Around 170F at the center. Overbaking makes them dense and rubbery.
- Canned salmonPeriod canned salmon came with soft vertebral bones and dark skin, which the recipe tells you to remove. Standard canned salmon usually still has them, though skinless, boneless packs are also sold; they mash to nothing and can be left in if you prefer, though the color is better without the skin.
- UnmoldingLet the cups stand out of the water for two or three minutes before turning out — a puff released the instant it leaves the oven is more likely to slump. Run a thin knife around the rim first.
- Yield and sauceSix to eight puffs, so about four servings as a main course at two to a plate. "Any good fish sauce" would most often mean a white or cream sauce, sometimes with capers, chopped egg or a little anchovy; hollandaise or a lemon butter suits it just as well.
- The clove garnishA whole clove stuck upright in the center appears here as one option alongside a sprig of parsley or celery, a garnish also found in other period recipes for molded fish and meat. It is decorative, not seasoning, and worth warning diners about or leaving off.
Salmon puffs belong to a large family of late-Victorian and Edwardian molded dishes — timbales, mousses, quenelles — that turned cooked or canned fish into something with a formal shape and a sauce, suitable for a lunch or a light supper course. Their popularity in American cookbooks of this period is often linked to canned Pacific salmon, which became cheap and widely distributed after the Columbia River and Alaskan canneries scaled up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; a tin of salmon was one of the first reliably good convenience foods in an ordinary pantry, and books like this one repeat it in croquettes, loaves, salads and puffs. The instruction to bake in a pan of hot water with paper laid over the tops is a reminder of what the equipment was: a range oven with no thermostat, where the cook managed temperature by insulation and steam rather than by turning a dial.