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January 27
Menu: Shrimp Cocktail; Salmon Croquettes, Tomato Sauce; French Peas Mashed Potatoes; Pickled Mangoes; Cottage Pudding, Maple Sauce; Coffee; can Salmon Croquettes-1 pound salmon, ½ teaspoon salt, red pepper to taste, 14 cup crackercrumbs, 1½ teaspoon grated onion, 1 well beaten egg, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley. From 1 can salmon, opened neatly, take fish and chop it fine; add salt and pepper, Crisco, parsley and crackercrumbs; moisten it with the egg and mix well, turn out upon dish; then roll into cones, dip these in beaten egg seasoned with salt and pepper, roll in breadcrumbs. Fry in deep Crisco until delicate brown, drain them a moment, arrange neatly on hot dish and serve with tomato sauce. The Crisco should be heated until crumb of bread becomes golden brown in 40 seconds.
A straightforward canned-salmon croquette from the Crisco era, when deep frying in shortening was the house style. The mixture is drier than most modern salmon cake recipes, which is what lets it hold a cone shape in hot fat.
- The frying test is the real thermometerA bread crumb browning in 40 seconds is the period signal for hot fat, roughly 375-390F for already-cooked mixtures like these; the slower 60-second test was used for raw batters. Use a thermometer and hold the range: cooler and the cones drink fat, hotter and the crumb coat colors before the inside heats through.
- Crackercrumb measureThe quantity printed as "14 cup" is almost certainly a quarter cup. Start with that, and add another spoonful only if the mixture will not hold a cone.
- Canned salmon then and nowA 1913 can was usually a pound of bone-in, skin-on pink or red salmon packed in its own liquor. Today's 14.75 oz cans are close enough; drain well and press out liquid, or the mix will not shape. The soft vertebrae can be mashed in, as they were then, or discarded.
- Crisco in the mixThe tablespoon worked into the salmon is there for richness and to keep the interior from going dry and chalky. Any solid shortening or softened butter does the same job.
- Chill before shapingThe recipe skips this, but half an hour in the refrigerator after mixing makes the cones far easier to form and much less likely to burst in the fat.
- BreadingEgg then breadcrumbs is a single coat. For deep frying, a pass through flour before the egg gives the crumbs something to grip and is worth the extra minute.
- Frying timeTwo to three minutes is enough for a delicate brown; the filling is already cooked fish and needs only to heat through. Fry in batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
- YieldA pound of salmon gives roughly eight croquettes, serving four as a main course with the tomato sauce, or six as a first course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. Its "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full menu for every day of the year, each leaning on Crisco somewhere, and croquettes were an ideal showcase: they use the shortening twice, once worked into the mixture and once as the frying medium, and they demonstrate the selling point that a neutral vegetable fat leaves no flavor of its own. Canned salmon made the dish possible at all. By the 1910s it was among the cheapest sources of animal protein in an inland pantry, which is why so many books of this period treat the salmon croquette as a standard weeknight dish rather than a novelty.