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Salmon Scallop
Butter a baking-dish and put in alternate layers of bread-crumbs and cooked flaked salmon, having bottom and top layer crumbs. Season with salt and pepper, fill up dish with milk, dot bits of butter over top, and bake. Left-over baked bluefish may be used in the same way. A Breakfast Relish of Smoked Salmon A few very thin slices of smoked salmon, dipped in boiling water and placed on rounds of browned and buttered toast, one slice on each round, and a poached egg slipped on top, make an appetizing breakfast dish.
Two dishes in one entry: a milk-bound crumb scallop for cooked salmon, and a quick smoked-salmon breakfast. Neither gives temperatures, times or quantities, which was normal in a book aimed at cooks who already knew the form.
- What a "scallop" isHere it means a shallow baked dish of flaked food layered with crumbs and moistened with milk or cream. The word is usually linked to the older escallop, though the derivation is not settled. It has nothing to do with the shellfish, though such dishes were once baked in scallop shells.
- Oven and timeThe original assumes you know. Bake at 375F for about 25 to 30 minutes, until the milk is absorbed and the top crumbs are browned. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating through.
- How much milk"Fill up dish with milk" means pouring until the liquid rises just to the level of the top crumb layer, not over it. Too much and the scallop weeps; too little and the crumbs stay dry. For a 1-quart dish expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups.
- CrumbsPeriod bread-crumbs were often dried stale bread grated fine, closer to what is sold as plain dry crumbs than to panko, though soft crumbs were also common. Coarse fresh crumbs will drink more milk and give a softer result.
- The salmonLeftover poached or baked salmon is the intent, but cheap canned salmon was a common substitute in households of this period. Pick out skin and the soft vertebrae if using canned, and remember it is already salted, so season the layers lightly.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of flaked fish with a similar volume of crumbs will roughly fill a 1-quart dish and serve four as a light supper or lunch.
- The smoked salmon relishDipping the slices in boiling water is meant to soften them and take the edge off the cure and the smoke. A second or two is plenty; longer turns cold-smoked salmon opaque and firm, which defeats the purpose. Hot-smoked salmon needs no dipping at all.
Left-over cookery had its own literature by the turn of the twentieth century, when domestic economy was taught as a discipline and waste was treated as a moral failing as much as a financial one. Salmon appears constantly in these books for a practical reason: canned salmon from the Pacific coast fisheries had become one of the cheapest and most reliable protein foods in an American pantry, so "cooked flaked salmon" was rarely far away, whether it began as a baked whole fish or a tin. The scallop itself is the workhorse form of the genre, since crumbs, milk and butter will carry almost any cooked flesh through a second appearance at table. The bluefish note is a reminder that the recipe is really a template. The smoked-salmon breakfast tacked on at the end belongs to a different tradition entirely, the light savoury relish served at the start of the day in comfortable households, and it survives largely unchanged as smoked salmon with a poached egg on toast.