Home › Fish, Eggs, and Sauces › Salmon Croquettes
Salmon Croquettes
(A Swedish recipe.) Fresh salmon is very fine and plentiful in Norway and Sweden, but canned fish may be used instead. Cook 1/2 pint of white stock with 1/2 ounce of butter, yolks of two eggs, parsley, pepper and salt, onion juice, and then add sufficient chopped salmon, free from bones, and stir well. Let it cool, make into croquettes, dip in eggs and bread-crumbs, and fry till brown. Drain carefully and serve with Tartare sauce and border of parsley. SALMON (as cooked along the Rhine.).
Cut up 3 shallots, 2 parsley roots, and a bunch of the leaves, with thyme, a bayleaf, a clove, and 3 carrots. Fry these in butter and add 1/2 pint of white wine. Lay the fish in a flat dish, pour this over, cover closely, and stew it until tender. Take out the fish, strain the sauce, thicken it with flour, butter, and a cup of rich milk, then pour it over the fish and serve with parsley and lemon. The fish may be cut into cutlets before cooking, if the kettle is too small to hold it.
SALMON (as cooked in Provincial France.).
Cut 1 1/2 pounds of salmon into four pieces, season to taste, add juice of a lemon and 1 ounce of butter. Cook it in a pan and add 1 dozen oysters, 6 shrimps, cut into dice, and 1 cup of white stock thickened with flour and butter. Stir for 10 minutes, or until the oysters and shrimps are done; add the yolk of 1 egg, a tablespoonful of sherry, and arrange the fish on a dish, with the sauce poured over.
Three salmon dishes run together under one heading. The croquette recipe as printed omits a binder, which is the first thing to sort out before you start.
- The missing binderHalf a pint of stock with butter and two yolks will not set firmly enough to shape, even after chilling. Contemporary croquette recipes generally bound the mixture with a very stiff white sauce: work about 1 oz flour into the butter and cook the stock down before the yolks and fish go in. Without it the mixture will collapse in the fryer.
- White stockA pale unbrowned stock, traditionally veal or chicken with no colour on the bones. Fish stock or a light chicken stock both work; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- Chill hard"Let it cool" means refrigerate until genuinely firm, at least two hours and preferably overnight. Croquettes shaped from lukewarm mixture burst in the fat.
- FryingDeep fat at 350-375F, in batches, until the crumb is browned. The interior is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust — two to three minutes.
- Canned salmonThe suggestion still holds. Drain it well and remove skin; the soft vertebrae in traditional canned salmon are edible but unpleasant in a croquette, so pick them out.
- The Rhine version: parsley rootsHamburg parsley, sold as parsley root, is grown for the white taproot rather than the leaf. Parsnip is the usual substitute, used sparingly since it is sweeter.
- The French version: oystersTen minutes of stirring will make the oysters rubbery and the shrimp tough. Both need one to two minutes at a bare simmer; add them at the end rather than cooking them with the sauce.
- Tempering the yolkIn the French version, stir a little hot sauce into the yolk before returning it to the pan, and keep the pan off the boil afterwards or the sauce will curdle.
- YieldThe croquette recipe gives no quantity of salmon, only "sufficient", so the yield is open; a batch on this amount of stock would plausibly serve four. The French dish, at 1 1/2 lb of salmon in four pieces, serves four as written.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a small genre of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that collected dishes from European travel and presented them as national types — the Swedish croquette, the Rhine stew, all set side by side under a single fish. The croquette itself is French in origin, a way of turning cooked meat or fish into something that could be crumbed and fried, and it spread across northern Europe in the nineteenth century as an economical dish that looked more elaborate than it was. The book's aside that "canned fish may be used instead" is the more telling detail: canned salmon from the Pacific coast had become cheap and ubiquitous by the 1890s, and household cookbooks of the period lean on it constantly, often while gesturing politely toward the fresh fish the reader was unlikely to have.