Home › Fish › Parsley (For the mold Remove oil skin)
Parsley (For the mold Remove oil skin)
For the mold. Remove oil, skin and bone from the salmon. Rub salmon smooth, add eggs well beaten, crackers, and seasonings. Turn into a Criscoed mold, and steam for one hour. Turn out and serve with sauce. For sauce. Blend Crisco and flour in a saucepan over fire, add milk, and stir and boil for five minutes. Add egg well beaten, and seasonings, pour at once over salmon. Garnish with parsley.
Sufficient for one small loaf.
A steamed salmon loaf with an egg-enriched white sauce, from a cookbook written to demonstrate Crisco. The method survives intact; the quantities did not travel with this page.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list that belonged above these directions is not present here, so no amounts for salmon, eggs, crackers or milk can be given. Period salmon loaves generally run to roughly a pound of fish, two eggs and a cup of cracker crumbs, but that is a convention of the era rather than this book's figures.
- The salmon is canned"Remove oil, skin and bone" describes a tall can of Pacific salmon, packed with the vertebrae and skin still in it. Modern canned salmon is sold both bone-in and boneless; either works, and the soft bones can be mashed in rather than discarded.
- CriscoStraight vegetable shortening, launched two years before this book. Butter substitutes one for one in both the mold and the sauce.
- "Rub salmon smooth"Mash the drained fish against the side of the bowl with a fork or the back of a spoon until no lumps remain. A food processor will do it in seconds but goes to paste quickly; pulse only.
- Steaming the moldGrease a mold or loaf tin of about a quart, cover it tightly, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with an inch or two of simmering water. An hour suits a loaf this size; because the loaf is bound with beaten egg, take the centre to 160F and it should feel set when pressed.
- The sauceA standard white sauce finished with egg. Boiling the roux and milk five minutes cooks out the raw flour taste, but once the beaten egg goes in the sauce must not return to the boil or it will curdle. Off the heat, whisk a little hot sauce into the egg first, then combine.
- SeasoningsUnspecified, as often in this book. Salt, pepper, a little lemon juice and a grating of nutmeg in the sauce are consistent with the period and with the flavour of canned salmon.
- Yield"One small loaf", which would stretch to roughly four as a main course. It slices more cleanly after a short rest in the mold, though the recipe intends it hot with the sauce poured over at once.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to explain a product nobody had asked for: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid white fat with no animal origin and no flavour of its own. The recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, and their job was to show that Crisco could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every department of cooking, which is why an unassuming salmon loaf greases its mold and thickens its sauce with the stuff. The dish itself belongs to the canned-salmon boom of the late nineteenth century, when Columbia River and Alaskan canneries put cheap protein into landlocked pantries and cookbooks filled with loaves, croquettes and molds built on a can and a handful of cracker crumbs. Steaming keeps the loaf moist and pale and allows it to be turned out whole, in the mid-Victorian manner that valued a dish holding its shape on the platter.