Salmon Dressing
To one large can of salmon, four eggs, two tablespoonfuls of butter, one heaping teaspoonful mustard, one-half saltspoon cayenne, one good teaspoonful salt, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Rub butter and condiments together, beat the the eggs, stir in, then add the vinegar. Set in hot water over the fire and stir until the consistency of thick custard; one-half cup of cream if you have it.
This is a cooked egg dressing in the old sense — a boiled salad dressing to be folded through or spooned over flaked canned salmon, not a stuffing. It is essentially a vinegar-sharpened custard, and everything depends on keeping it below the point where eggs scramble.
- The hinge: gentle heatCook it in a double boiler over water that is hot but barely trembling, and pull it at about 170-180F, when it coats the spoon like thick custard. Boiling water underneath will give you sweet scrambled eggs in vinegar. If it does begin to grain, a quick blitz with a stick blender or a push through a fine sieve will usually bring it back.
- "One large can of salmon"The period tall can held 1 lb; today's tall can is 14.75 oz, which is close enough. Drain it well, and either mash the soft vertebrae and skin in (they are edible and were expected to be eaten) or pick them out.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a pinch — about 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne. That is a mild warmth in this quantity, not heat.
- MustardA heaping teaspoonful of mustard here most likely means dry mustard powder; many nineteenth-century recipes use powder unless they specify "French" or "made" mustard, and the direction to rub it into the softened butter with the salt and cayenne points that way. Doing so keeps it from staying lumpy.
- VinegarPlain cider or white wine vinegar at around 5 percent acidity. Distilled white vinegar works but is harsher; whatever you use, add it after the eggs as written.
- The creamThe optional half cup of cream is worth including — it buffers the acid, slows the curdling and turns a sharp dressing into a sauce. Stir it in at the end, off the heat, and thin further with a spoonful more if the mixture stiffens as it cools.
- Yield and servingEnough dressing for one can of salmon, serving six to eight as a cold salad on lettuce, in a mould, or as a filling for sandwiches and pastry shells. It thickens considerably in the refrigerator and keeps two or three days, covered.
- Butter and eggsTwo tablespoons of butter and four eggs to a pound of fish is a rich ratio by modern taste; the mixture is meant to be assertive because canned salmon is bland and salty. Taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, since the packing liquid has already salted the fish.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this one were the workhorse of American salad-making before jarred mayonnaise: eggs, butter, mustard and vinegar thickened over hot water, cheaper and more stable in a kitchen without refrigeration than an oil emulsion, and less likely to break in an unpractised hand. The fish it dresses tells its own story — canned salmon from the Columbia River and later Alaska canneries had, by the 1890s, become one of the cheapest protein sources in the country, shipped inland by rail and stocked in pantries hundreds of miles from any coast. That is why a household book of this era treats a tin of salmon as an everyday staple rather than a luxury.