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Salmon Sandwiches
Mix the salmon with a mayonnaise dressing, about one-half cup being sufficient for the small-sized cans. Mince the fish fine, bones and all, the bones being chalky in their preserved state. Add the dressing, mixing well. Remove the soft crumbs from a number of French rolls and fill the space thus made with the fish mixture.
A hollowed-roll sandwich of the kind that filled tea trays and picnic baskets around 1900. The recipe assumes you know what a can of salmon looks like and leaves everything else to judgment.
- The canA "small-sized can" of salmon in this period was most likely the half-pound flat tin, roughly comparable to a small modern can. Half a cup of mayonnaise to that much fish is generous by current taste; start with a third of a cup and add more if the mixture will not hold together.
- Bones and allThis is the hinge. The soft vertebrae in canned salmon are edible, high in calcium, and crush to nothing under a fork, but only if you actually mash them rather than folding the fish whole. Break them down against the side of the bowl before the dressing goes in. Skin is a matter of preference; lift it out if you would rather not have it.
- MayonnaiseThe book means a proper emulsified dressing, which in 1900 was made at home with raw yolk and oil. Commercial jarred mayonnaise works and is made with pasteurised egg. If you make your own, use pasteurised eggs, since nothing here is cooked afterwards.
- French rollsNot baguette. These were small oval or round soft rolls, about the size of a modern dinner roll or a short sub roll. Cut a cap off one end or split lengthwise, pull out the crumb, and pack the filling into the shell.
- What to do with the crumbThe removed interior need not be wasted: dry it for breadcrumbs, or work a little of it back into the salmon if the mixture is loose.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none, which is typical of the book's terseness rather than an instruction to leave it plain. Lemon juice, black pepper, and a little minced celery or cucumber are period-appropriate and correct the flatness of canned fish.
- Yield and holdingOne small can fills about four to six rolls. Fill them close to serving; a stuffed roll left standing an hour goes soggy from the inside out. Keep refrigerated and eat the same day.
Canned salmon was one of the great cheap proteins of the late nineteenth century. Commercial canneries on the Columbia River and in British Columbia had made Pacific salmon a pantry staple across North America and Britain by the 1880s, and cookbooks of the period are full of ways to dress it up: croquettes, loaves, scallops, and sandwiches like this one. The instruction to mince the bones in shows that the softening effect of canning was well understood, and may owe as much to thrift as to nutrition. The hollowed roll, filled rather than layered, was a common sandwich form for buffets and travelling lunches, since it holds its filling without falling apart in a napkin. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued this cook book to the same audience of middle-class housekeepers who bought its magazines.