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Salmon Patties
Skin and bone a nice piece of salmon, chop the flesh well and season it highly with grated nutmeg, cayenne pepper, salt and pepper; rub in a small quantity of fresh butter and bind it with the beaten yolk of an egg. Butter some tartlet tins, line them with puff paste and fill them with the salmon mixture; cover each with a flat of paste, trim round the edges, moisten and press them together and bake the patties. These may be eaten either hot or cold.
Oscar gives no oven temperature, no timing and no yield, which was normal for a professional writing for cooks who already knew. The one thing to get right is that the filling goes in raw, so the pastry and the fish have to finish together.
- OvenPuff paste needs a hot oven, 425F, to lift before the butter melts out. Bake 20-25 minutes; the fish inside should reach 145F, which it will comfortably in that time in a small tartlet.
- Chop, do not grind"Chop the flesh well" means a knife-cut mince, not a food processor. Processed salmon turns to paste and bakes dense; hand-chopped pieces stay in distinct flakes.
- "Season it highly"For a pound of salmon, roughly a teaspoon of salt, a quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg and cayenne to taste. The recipe allows for them being eaten cold, and cold food reads flat, which may be part of why the seasoning is called for heavily.
- Puff pasteAll-butter frozen puff pastry is a fair substitute. Roll it thinner than it comes for the linings, keep it cold, and chill the assembled patties 15 minutes before they go in so the layers set.
- Tartlet tinsThese are small shallow individual tins, about 2 to 3 inches across, not the deep fluted moulds sold for tarts today. A shallow muffin tin works. Butter them as instructed; puff paste sticks.
- Sealing and ventingThe recipe says only to moisten the rims and press them together; water is the usual reading. Cut a small vent in each lid or the steam from the fish may lift the top.
- YieldA "nice piece" of salmon is about a pound of trimmed flesh, which fills roughly twelve small patties, with one egg yolk and about a tablespoon of butter to bind.
- Serving coldIf they are to be eaten cold, cool them on a rack rather than in the tins so the base does not steam and soften. Eat within a day and keep them refrigerated.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 cook book is largely a record of the hotel's working repertoire alongside a great deal of borrowed classical French practice. Small hot-or-cold pastries of this kind are usually associated with buffet and supper service, where a tray of patties could sit out through a long evening; the heavy hand with nutmeg and cayenne is characteristic of food built to hold. Salmon in this period arrived at New York hotels salted, canned or, increasingly by the 1890s, iced in refrigerated rail cars, though the book itself says nothing of where its fish came from; a fresh piece was evidently worth specifying. The word patty here is the older English sense, a small enclosed pastry case, generally traced to an alteration of the French pâté in its original meaning of something baked in paste rather than a meat spread.