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Salmon Croquettes
cup green peas tablespoonful lemonjuice cup boiled or canned salmon ½ cup white sauce No. 4 (see page 68) Salt, pepper, dash nutmeg Flake the fish, season with salt and pepper as needed, and sprinkle with lemon-juice. Add nutmeg to white sauce, and mix fish, sauce, and peas together. Set away to get very cold. Shape, roll in fine white crumbs, dip carefully in slightly beaten egg and roll again in crumbs. Fry in deep fat. If the mixture should be too soft to shape add a few cracker-crumbs. Press the peas through a wire strainer without any liquid, as they need to be very stiff. Season well with salt and pepper.
Serve the croquettes with sauce Tartare (see page 74).
A standard croquette formula from the era of the bound-with-white-sauce leftover: the whole thing succeeds or fails on how stiff and how cold the mixture is before shaping.
- Chill is the hinge"Set away to get very cold" is doing real work here; the mixture wants to be thoroughly chilled through, not merely cool. A barely cool mixture will slump in the shaping and burst in the fat, and no amount of crumb will save it.
- Missing quantitiesThe fractions have dropped out before "cup green peas" and "cup boiled or canned salmon" in this printing; the half cup of white sauce is intact. Any reading of the pea and salmon amounts is guesswork, but the proportion that matters is that the sauce is just enough to bind, not to moisten.
- White sauce No. 4The recipe cross-refers to a numbered sauce on page 68 that is not reproduced here. For croquettes the binding sauce needs to be very thick, thick enough to hold its shape when cold; a pouring bechamel will not hold. Check the book's own page 68 before substituting.
- The peasPressing peas through a wire strainer dry is the whole point of that instruction: any liquid loosens the binding. Modern frozen peas should be cooked until quite tender before sieving, or worked through a food mill.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only "deep fat". Too cool and the crumbs absorb oil and the croquettes leak; too hot and the crust colors before the cold center has warmed through. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop.
- Crumbs"Fine white crumbs" are dried bread crumbs, not the coarse panko now common. The double coating — crumb, egg, crumb — is what seals the croquette, so do not skip the first pass.
- Canned salmonDrain it thoroughly and press out liquid before flaking, or add the cracker-crumbs the recipe allows for if the mixture is too soft to shape.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The quantities suggest a small dish, enough for a few servings as a light main course with the tartare sauce.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American leftover cookbook between roughly 1880 and 1930: any cooked meat or fish, bound with a stiff white sauce, chilled, breaded and fried, appeared respectable enough for a luncheon table while using up what was already in the icebox. Salmon was a common fish version because canned Pacific salmon had become cheap and ubiquitous after the Columbia River and Alaska canneries scaled up in the late nineteenth century, putting a firm-fleshed fish within reach of households far from any coast. The numbered white sauces and cross-references to other pages are typical of the period's cookery-school style, in which a small set of mother sauces was memorized and then indexed rather than repeated — a system found broadly across cookery-school writing of the period rather than owing to any single school or author.