Home › A Calendar of Dinners › March 17
March 17
Menu: St. Patrick's Day; Irish Potato Bisque; Olives; Salted Pistachio Nuts; Boiled Salmon, Parsley Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Brussels Sprouts; Shamrock Salad; St. Patrick's Pie; Green Frosted Cakes; Green Mints; Coffee Boiled Salmon-Put the salmon in enough boiling water to cover, add 1 teaspoon salt to each quart of water; boil 1 minute, then draw on one side, and simmer slowly until cooked, allowing 10 minutes to the pound; drain thoroughly, and serve on folded napkin; decorate with parsley. on Serve with parsley sauce. For sauce. Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup milk, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste, stir till boiling, then boil 8 minutes, add 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, mix well and use.
A standard Victorian-era poached salmon with a white sauce, written for a coal range where a pan could be slid off the hot plate. The timing is the part a modern cook should ignore.
- The timing is the hingeTen minutes to the pound will take salmon well past dry. Cook it until the thickest part reaches 125-130F and the flesh just begins to flake, which for a thick centre-cut piece is usually 8-12 minutes total in barely trembling water, whatever it weighs.
- "Draw on one side"Range language: slide the pan off the direct heat to the cooler part of the stovetop. On a modern hob, bring to a boil, then reduce to the lowest setting so the surface only shivers.
- Crisco in the sauceCrisco is all-vegetable shortening, and the book exists to sell it. Two tablespoons of butter make a better parsley sauce and work much the same way in the roux, though butter carries water and milk solids that shortening does not.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch is enough against the milk.
- Eight minutes of boilingThe length was presumably aimed at cooking the raw-flour taste out of the roux. Whisking the flour and fat together for a minute or two before the milk goes in achieves the same thing, after which three or four minutes of gentle simmering will do.
- Salting the waterA teaspoon per quart is light seasoning, not a brine. It flavours the surface only, so salt the fish itself as well.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin under the fish absorbs draining liquid and was the formal service of the period. A warmed platter and thorough draining accomplish the same and spare the laundry.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. As a rough allowance, 6-8 oz of salmon per person; the sauce as written, one cup of milk thickened, would dress about four to six portions.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and its recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil, credited in the book as formerly cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a dish for every day of the year, each one quietly routing butter, lard or suet through the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. Boiled salmon served whole on a folded napkin with a green sauce was already a fixed piece of English and American formal cookery by the mid-nineteenth century, and appears in this book less as an innovation than as proof that Crisco could stand in wherever butter had been. The heavy flour-thickened parsley sauce and the ten-minutes-to-the-pound rule both belong to a time when fish was cooked through as a matter of course; the taste for salmon left translucent at the centre is a much later development.