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Salmon Bisque
1½ cups flaked, fresh, cooked or canned salmon 1 small green pepper, ground 1 tablespoon onion, ground 1 teaspoon parsley, minced 1 pint water 1½ pints milk 1 cup canned tomato, strained 1/2 tablespoon Karo 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Combine salmon, tomato, pepper, onion, water and parsley, simmer fifteen minutes. Add one-eighth teaspoon baking soda. Thicken with the cornstarch and Mazola blended. Add the Karo and seasonings and thin with the milk.
A brand-sponsored soup from the Corn Products Refining Company, written in the shorthand of its era. Two of the quantities have lost digits in printing, and the sequence of steps matters more than it looks.
- On the quantitiesThe salmon reads 1½ cups, which a 14–15 oz can, drained and flaked, gives roughly. The milk is printed as "11/2 pints" and should be read as 1½ pints, or 3 cups.
- Brand namesKaro is corn syrup (light), Mazola is corn oil, and Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch is plain cornstarch. All three belonged to the same company, which is why they recur throughout the book.
- The soda is the hingeThe eighth teaspoon of baking soda neutralises enough tomato acid to keep the milk from curdling when it goes in. Do not skip it, and do not increase it — more soda gives a soapy, flattened taste and dulls the tomato.
- Add the milk off the boilThe instruction to "thin with the milk" comes last for a reason. Warm the milk and stir it in with the pan off direct heat; once the milk is in, hold the soup below a simmer or it will separate regardless of the soda.
- Cornstarch and oil, not a flour rouxBlend the cornstarch into the cold oil to a smooth slurry before it meets the hot liquid, then cook two or three minutes after it thickens so the starch loses its raw edge. Cornstarch sets and then thins again if boiled hard, so keep the heat gentle.
- "Ground" pepper and onionThe period sense is put through a food grinder — a fine mince or a few pulses in a processor is the equivalent. The point is that no piece should be identifiable in the finished bisque.
- The simmer is for the vegetablesFifteen minutes softens the green pepper and onion and takes the metallic edge off canned tomato. Cooked or canned salmon needs none of it; expect the flakes to break down substantially, which is what a bisque wants.
- Yield and seasoningAbout seven cups, serving six as a light luncheon course. The half tablespoon of corn syrup reads as sweetening for the tomato rather than flavour in its own right; taste before adding more salt, since canned salmon carries a fair amount.
This comes from one of the many promotional cookbooks issued by the Corn Products Refining Company in the first decades of the twentieth century, whose purpose was to place Karo, Mazola and Argo cornstarch into recipes where a cook might otherwise reach for sugar, butter and flour. Corn oil was a relatively new grocery product and needed arguing for, so it turns up here doing a job in place of a butter roux — that was presumably unfamiliar to many cooks of the period. "Bisque" had by then drifted a long way from its French sense of a shellfish soup thickened with rice or its own shells, and in American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s it meant little more than a creamed, puréed soup, often tomato-based. Salmon was a natural candidate because canned Pacific salmon was cheap, shelf-stable and widely stocked, which made it a staple of the light luncheon dishes that filled this section of such books.