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Salmon Au Gratin
One cup of cold boiled salmon, flaked; mix with one-half cup of drawn butter; pepper and salt. Fill little earthen dishes with the mixture covered with fine bread crumbs. and brown.
KEDGEREE (a Breakfast Dish) -One-half pound of cold flaked fish free from skin and bone; three ounces of boiled rice; two hard boiled eggs. Melt two ounces of butter in a saucepan, add the fish and stir gently. Put in the rice, the whites of the eggs chopped, and season to taste. Move gently about over the fire until thoroughly hot, and serve on a flat dish with the yolks of the eggs pressed through a ricer over the top.
Two leftover-fish dishes printed as one entry: a gratin and an Anglo-Indian breakfast. Both assume you already have cooked salmon or white fish sitting cold in the larder.
- "Drawn butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter means a simple white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of hot water or fish stock, cooked smooth. Plain melted butter will not bind the flakes and the gratin will separate into oil and dry fish.
- MeasurementsOne cup flaked salmon is roughly 5-6 oz of cooked fish. The kedgeree's three ounces of boiled rice most likely means cooked weight, which is only about half a cup; two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons.
- "And brown"The only heat instruction given; the book names no oven temperature. In a modern kitchen a hot oven (around 425F) for 10-15 minutes will brown crumbs on a shallow dish, or use the broiler for 2-3 minutes with the dishes close to the element. The mixture is already cooked, so the aim is colour, not cooking through.
- Little earthen dishesIndividual ramekins or small gratin dishes of 4-6 oz. Shallow is better than deep here: the point is a large crumbed surface. Buttering the crumbs, or tossing them with a little melted butter first, gives a better colour than dry crumbs.
- Keep the kedgeree moving, keep it briefThis is a reheat. Once the fish and rice are hot through, stop. Extended stirring over the fire breaks the flakes into paste and dries the rice.
- Season it properlyNeither dish carries any acid or spice as written. Many Anglo-Indian kedgeree recipes include curry powder, and a squeeze of lemon over the finished dish rescues both recipes from blandness. Cold cooked fish and cooked rice both need more salt than you expect.
- The sieved yolkA "ricer" here does the work of a fine sieve. Push the hard-boiled yolks through while they are still slightly warm and they fall in soft crumbs; cold yolks tend to smear.
- Cold cooked fishBoth dishes depend on leftovers being sound. Cooked fish keeps two days refrigerated, and reheating to steaming hot is the intent of "thoroughly hot" in the original.
- YieldThe salmon fills two or three small ramekins as a first course. The kedgeree serves two generously at breakfast, three at a pinch.
Kedgeree is the older and stranger of the two: it comes to English kitchens from India, and its name is generally traced to khichri, the Indian dish of rice and pulses, which British households in the nineteenth century reworked into rice, smoked or leftover fish and hard-boiled egg and moved to the breakfast table. By the time this recipe appeared it was thoroughly domesticated, printed without explanation beyond the parenthesis "(a Breakfast Dish)," and useful chiefly as a way of finishing yesterday's fish. The salmon au gratin belongs to the same economy. Canned and cold boiled salmon were both cheap and widely available by 1900, and gratins in "little earthen dishes" let a household serve a small amount of expensive fish as something that looked deliberate rather than reheated. The pairing of the two under one heading is a fair picture of how such books were assembled: recipes grouped less by cuisine than by the problem they solved.