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Escalloped Tuna Fish or Salmon with Peas
1/2 pound canned tuna fish or salmon 1 can peas 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 pint milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Celery or onion salt 3/4 cup coarse dry bread crumbs Make a white sauce of the two tablespoons Mazola, cornstarch, salt, pepper and milk. Oil a three-pint baking dish with Mazola. Put in a layer of peas, then one of the fish, flaked, and one of the sauce. Continue in this way until all is used, putting sauce on the top. Cover with the crumbs mixed with two more tablespoons Mazola and bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. about thirty-five minutes.
A straightforward pantry casserole from a corn-products advertising booklet, and it works as written. A few of its measures assume 1920s can sizes and a cornstarch-thickened sauce that behaves differently from a flour roux.
- The hinge: cornstarch, not flourTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a sauce roughly as thick as a flour-based medium white sauce made with four tablespoons. Whisk the starch into the cold milk before it meets heat, then bring it just to a boil and hold it there a moment — cornstarch does not thicken fully until it boils, but prolonged boiling or hard stirring afterwards will thin it back out.
- MazolaCorn oil, still sold under that name. Any neutral oil works. Because there is no butter or roux, the sauce tastes plainer than a béchamel; the celery or onion salt is doing real seasoning work here, not decoration.
- Celery or onion saltGiven without a quantity. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste the sauce before assembling, and cut the half teaspoon of plain salt accordingly if the canned fish is packed in brine.
- Canned peas"One can" is left unspecified. Period pea cans ranged from about a No. 1 to a No. 2, so somewhere between roughly 1 1/4 and 2 1/2 cups drained; a modern 15 oz can (about 1 1/2 cups drained) is a reasonable stand-in. Frozen peas, thawed and drained, are a direct swap and hold their shape better through thirty-five minutes of baking.
- The fishHalf a pound of drained canned tuna is about two standard 5 oz cans. If using oil-packed tuna, drain it well or the sauce will separate at the edges.
- Baking dishThree pints is a 6-cup dish, i.e. a 1.5-quart casserole. The layers need room for the sauce to bubble without spilling.
- CrumbsCoarse dry bread crumbs, not fine packaged crumbs, which turn pasty when oiled. Tear stale bread and dry it in a low oven, then toss with the oil so every crumb is coated; untouched crumbs scorch before the casserole heats through.
- Oven and yield350°F is stated, which is right — long enough to heat through and brown the top without breaking the starch-thickened sauce. Serves four as a luncheon dish, three as a supper.
This comes from a booklet published to sell Mazola oil and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and the recipe is built around demonstrating them: oil in place of butter for both the sauce and the crumb topping, cornstarch in place of flour as the thickener. Escalloped dishes — layers of something savoury bound in white sauce under a crumb crust — were the backbone of American luncheon cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century, cheap, extendable, and made almost entirely from tins. Canned tuna was still a relatively new arrival in that pantry; the California albacore industry dates from the first years of the century, and cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s routinely offer it as interchangeable with the longer-established canned salmon, as this one does. The whole recipe is a small monument to the shelf-stable kitchen: fish, peas and milk, none of them fresh, assembled in ten minutes.