Home › Left-Over Fish › Salmon Soup
Salmon Soup
The remnants of any canned or boiled salmon may be used for this. Pick the fish apart and moisten with the liquor in the can and a little warm water, or water in which the fish was boiled. Press st through a purée strainer. There should be one cup fish pulp and liquid. Season with salt and pepper as needed. Make two cups of white sauce No. I (see page 67), add the fish, and heat together, but do not boil. Just before serving add a little well-washed and finely minced parsley, or a tablespoonful of hot green peas. If too thick, thin with a little hot milk.
A thin cream soup built on leftover salmon and a basic white sauce. It comes together in about fifteen minutes and lives or dies on not letting it boil.
- Do not let it boilOnce the fish pulp goes into the sauce, hold it just below a simmer. Boiling a milk-based soup risks curdling it and drives out what delicate flavour the fish has left.
- White sauce No. IThe cross-reference is to the first of the book's white sauces, presumably the thinner sort, but the page is not reproduced here and the exact proportions are unknown. A thick sauce will give a paste rather than a soup.
- The purée strainerA fine-mesh sieve and the back of a ladle will do the same work. A blender or food processor is faster and gives a smoother result, though it will also grind in any skin and bone, so pick those out first.
- Canned salmon todayModern canned salmon is packed in water or oil rather than heavy brine, and the soft vertebrae are edible and worth mashing in for calcium. The canning liquid is salty enough that you should season only at the end.
- Salt and pepper, lastBetween the can liquid and the white sauce, this seasons itself further than you expect. Taste after the fish is in and warmed through.
- ConsistencyThin with hot milk rather than cold, so the soup does not drop out of temperature and need reheating.
- Peas and parsleyThe recipe adds a little parsley or a tablespoonful of hot peas at the very end; either way it is a small finishing touch. Frozen peas need only a minute in boiling water.
- YieldAbout three cups of finished soup, before any thinning with hot milk.
Cook books of left overs belong to a genre that flourished in American and British households from the 1890s through the First World War, when domestic economy was taught as a moral discipline as much as a practical one and wasting food was a failure of management. Canned salmon is a telling ingredient here: Pacific coast canneries were turning it out in quantity by the 1880s, and a tin in the pantry meant fish in a household nowhere near the sea. The method " pick, moisten, force through a sieve, bind with white sauce " is the standard cream-soup formula of the period, applied interchangeably to fish, peas, celery or chicken; learn the white sauce and the rest of the chapter follows. The instruction to wash the parsley well may perhaps be read as a trace of an era before packaged greens, though the recipe itself says nothing of the reason.