Canned Salmon
The California canned salmon is nice served cold with any of the fish-sauces. For a breakfast dish, it may be heated, seasoned with salt and pepper, and served on slices of toast, with milk thickened with flour and butter poured over it.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but it does tell you what to do: warm the fish, season it, sauce it, put it on toast. The only real technique is the flour-thickened milk, which the book assumes you can already make.
- The sauce is a white sauceThe sauce is a plain white sauce -- "milk thickened with flour and butter" is what a later cook would call a white sauce, and the book gives no proportions. A workable modern version: cook 2 tablespoons butter with 2 tablespoons flour for a minute or two without browning, then whisk in 1 cup milk and simmer until it coats a spoon. Cooking the flour past the raw stage is the step that decides whether the dish tastes pasty.
- Don't cook the salmon againCanned salmon is already fully cooked in the can. Warm it through gently in the sauce or in a covered pan off high heat; boiling it breaks the flakes into mush and pushes out the oil.
- Which can to buyThe "California canned salmon" of the period was Pacific fish packed with skin and bones. Canned sockeye or pink salmon still comes that way. The soft vertebrae are edible and a source of calcium, though some cooks pick them out along with the skin.
- Season for salt already presentMost canned salmon is packed with added salt. Drain it, taste before salting the sauce, and lean on black pepper, lemon and a little chopped parsley or dill instead.
- The fish sauces referencedFor the cold service, the book is pointing the reader to the fish sauces given elsewhere in it; the recipe itself names none. A modern equivalent is a lemon mayonnaise or a mustard vinaigrette.
- ToastUse bread with enough structure to hold sauce: a thick slice of white sandwich loaf or good sourdough, toasted dry and firm rather than pale.
- YieldOne 14–15 oz can with a cup of sauce serves three to four over toast, or two if it is the whole breakfast.
Canned salmon was one of the first industrial foods to reach ordinary American tables in quantity. Commercial canneries began operating on the Sacramento and then the Columbia River in the 1860s and 1870s, and by the time cookbooks like this one were compiled, tinned Pacific salmon was cheap, shelf-stable and available a thousand miles from any salmon. That is much of why it appears here at all: a kitchen with no access to fresh salmon could still put the fish on the table out of a tin. The dish itself — warmed fish under white sauce on toast — belongs to the vast family of late-nineteenth-century creamed-on-toast breakfasts, the same logic that produced creamed chipped beef and creamed eggs, where a flour-and-milk sauce stretched a small amount of protein across a plate.