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Salmon Loaf
1½ cups cold cooked 3 eggs, well beaten salmon (fresh or canned) cup bread-crumbs Mix well and steam dressing (see below). 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter Salt and pepper one hour. Serve with
A plain steamed fish pudding of the sort that turned Sunday's poached salmon into Monday's supper. The proportions are generous with egg, which is what holds the loaf together in the absence of any starch beyond crumbs.
- Steaming, not bakingThe loaf is cooked in a covered, greased mould or basin set over simmering water, not in the oven. Steam keeps it moist and pale; baked, the same mixture dries and browns at the edges. A one-quart pudding basin or a small loaf tin covered tightly with foil, standing on a rack in a deep covered pot with an inch or two of water, does the job.
- An hour is rightUnlike the overcooked oysters and vegetables of period cookery, the hour here is genuinely needed: it is the time required for a dense egg-bound mixture to set through in gentle steam. Test with a skewer at the centre, which should come out clean, and check the water level partway through.
- Crumb quantityThe bread-crumb measure has lost its figure in this printing. One cup of soft fresh crumbs against 1½ cups of flaked salmon and three eggs gives a loaf that slices; less makes it custardy, more makes it stodgy.
- Salmon, fresh or cannedCanned salmon of this period generally meant a solid-pack tin with skin and soft bones, which were mashed in. Modern canned salmon works the same way and is worth draining well before measuring, or the loaf will weep. Cold poached or roast salmon should be flaked and picked over for pin bones.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper alone is thin by current taste, and the recipe assumes a sauce will carry the flavour. Lemon zest, a scrape of nutmeg, chopped parsley or a spoonful of grated onion are all period-appropriate additions.
- The dressingThe recipe directs the cook to a dressing given below, which is not reproduced here. Any well-made white sauce with lemon, or a hollandaise, suits it; the loaf is lightly seasoned on the assumption that something rich goes over it.
- YieldServes three or four as a light main course. It slices more cleanly the day after and is good cold with cucumber.
Left-over cookery books were a genre of their own in the decades either side of 1900, when refrigeration was uncertain, portions were large and throwing food away was a visible moral failing. A steamed fish loaf solved two problems at once: it used up cooked fish that would not survive another day loose in the larder, and the long steam brought the whole mixture to a temperature that made yesterday's salmon safe to serve again. Canned salmon, cheap and widely available from the Pacific canneries by the 1890s, is offered here on equal terms with fresh, which suggests how far the tin had entered the ordinary household kitchen. The technique itself is older than the tin: steamed puddings, savoury and sweet, in a basin over a pot were the standard way of cooking bound mixtures in kitchens where oven space was scarce or the range fire unreliable.