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Salmon Cutlets
Add one cup of hot mashed potato to one cup of cold flaked salmon. Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Shape into cutlets and fry as croquettes.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make croquettes, which is where most of the work actually lies. The Butterick book's croquette method — roll in fine crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again, and fry in deep fat — is what "fry as croquettes" is pointing at.
- The hinge: dry mixture, chilledOne cup potato to one cup salmon has no egg binder, so it holds together best if the potato is dry and floury, mashed with little or no milk. The recipe calls for hot potato; chilling the shaped cutlets before they meet the fat will help them keep their shape.
- What "cutlets" means hereNot a slice of fish. A croquette mixture pressed into a flat chop shape, tapered at one end, sometimes with a short piece of macaroni or a clean bone stub pushed in to mimic the rib. Purely decorative, and skipping it changes nothing.
- The salmon"Cold flaked salmon" would have meant leftover boiled or baked salmon, or tinned salmon, which was cheap and widely available by this period. Canned salmon works and is close to the intent; drain it well, and pick out skin and the soft vertebrae unless you want the calcium.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Modern practice for croquettes is deep fat around 350-375F. The interior is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust: a few minutes, turning once, until deep gold. Cooler fat waterlogs the crumbs and lets the cutlets fall apart.
- Seasoning by tasteNo quantities are given for salt, pepper or lemon. Taste the mixture before shaping — it needs more salt than seems reasonable, since potato swallows it, and about a teaspoon of lemon juice for the two cups.
- YieldTwo cups of mixture should give roughly six to eight cutlets, enough for three or four people as a light main course.
Fish croquettes of this kind belong to the long tradition of dishes designed around yesterday's dinner: a piece of boiled salmon that would not be served again as it stood, bound with the mashed potato left in the pot, crumbed and fried into something that looks deliberate. What changed by the early 1900s was the salmon. Pacific canneries had made tinned salmon one of the cheapest protein sources in the American pantry, and cookbooks of the period seem increasingly to have treated "cold flaked salmon" as an ingredient you buy rather than a leftover you happen to have. The "cutlet" shaping is often traced to French service, where croquettes were said to be moulded to imitate the chops of a grander menu, which says a good deal about how much presentation was expected to compensate for economy.