Salmon Puffs
Remove the skin and bones from one pound of canned salmon, chop the meat fine, and add one tablespoon of melted butter, one saltspoon of salt, the same of white pepper or paprika, one-half a cup of fine soft bread crumbs, one tablespoon of lemon juice or fine vinegar, and three well beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly, and pack the mass in six or eight cups, filling each cup even full. Set the cups at once in a pan containing hot water that does not reach their tops by nearly an inch, and bake for one-half an hour. If the oven is very hot, lay a sheet of thick paper over the cups. Turn out upon a hot platter, into the center of each puff thrust a sprig of parsley or celery or a clove, and pour about them any good fish sauce.
A baked salmon custard in individual moulds — what the period called a puff or timbale. The proportions are sound; only the vessels, the oven language and the garnish need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a scant 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and white pepper, which is modest for a pound of fish — taste the mixture before it goes into the cups.
- A pound of canned salmonStandard cans today run 14–15 oz and yield rather less than a pound drained, so buy two. Canned salmon is still often packed with skin and soft bones, though skinless and boneless is also sold; the soft bones mash in rather than needing removal.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; set it at 325–350F. A custard bound with three eggs will curdle and weep if the oven runs hot, and the recipe's sheet of thick paper is there to shield the tops when the oven is very hot; foil laid loosely on top does the same job.
- The cupsSix 6-oz ramekins or ovenproof custard cups. Butter them well — the recipe assumes you will turn the puffs out whole, and unbuttered china will not release them.
- The water bathUse water that is genuinely hot from the kettle; the recipe has the pan already holding the hot water when the cups go in, and the water should stay nearly an inch below the rims. Starting with cold water lengthens the bake.
- DonenessHalf an hour is about right for 6-oz cups, but judge by the centre: it should be just set, with a faint wobble, and a knife slid in should come out clean. Egg custards go grainy within a few minutes of overcooking.
- The garnishA whole clove thrust into a fish custard is a Victorian flourish that reads as a mistake to modern palates. Parsley or a celery leaf is the better of the two options given.
- Fish sauce"Any good fish sauce" means a white sauce of the period — a béchamel with chopped hard-boiled egg, a cream sauce sharpened with lemon, or hollandaise. Nothing in the phrase refers to bottled Southeast Asian fish sauce.
- YieldSix generous or eight small puffs, a light main course for four with sauce and a vegetable, or a first course for six to eight.
Canned salmon made this dish possible. From the 1870s onward, canneries on the Columbia, Fraser and Sacramento rivers shipped Pacific salmon east and across the Atlantic in tins so cheap that an inland household with no fishmonger could serve salmon on a weeknight, and American cookbooks of the following forty years are thick with croquettes, loaves, timbales and puffs built on it. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at exactly that reader: a middle-class housekeeper working without much help, who wanted dishes that looked composed at table. Baking a bound mixture in individual moulds set in hot water and turning it out seems to have been a common trick of the era for turning a pound of tinned fish into something that could be sent in looking like a course from a hotel kitchen.