No-- that's obviously not an echinoderm. The title gives my game away: Magic Entrees to Make with Canned Salmon (Canned Salmon Industry, 1937) is all about the canned salmon, which is only star-shaped if you want it to be.
While the book does have a few lengthy, involved recipes, like Crusty Salmon Loaf...
... for those who want to spend the entire afternoon delicately shaping an unsliced loaf of bread into a boat, drying it, browning it, filling it wit a salmon loaf mixture, continuing to bake it, and then garnishing with egg slices and pickled peaches, most of the recipes are pretty simple.
One just entails dumping a chilled and drained can of salmon into the center of a salad and telling diners to have at it.
See? I wasn't kidding. If you need a recipe for that pile of ingredients, here's the Summer Salmon Delight Recipe.
You may notice that the Canned Salmon Industry likes to print bits of salmon propaganda in italics below the recipe whenever there's a little extra space. I wondered for a second at salmon being a good source of Vitamin G, but then I thought it sounded familiar. Yep! As I discovered many years ago, Vitamin B-2 is the Vitamin Formerly Known as Vitamin G.
Even some of the fancier-looking entrees aren't really that involved. The Salmon Combination Grill looks pretty impressive, decked out with browned pastry puffs and surrounded by a fan of what you might initially mistake for browned fingerling potatoes.
And then reading the recipe, you'll realize it's far easier. There's no pastry-- just browned mashed potatoes (which don't even have to be piped through a pastry tip if you're lazy). Plus those fingerling potatoes that don't look quite right...
... are actually browned bananas. Once you realize this is basically just canned salmon rounds plopped on top of mounds of mashed potatoes (with a bit more on the top as decoration if you feel fancy) and your willingness to eat that with hot bananas and grapefruit sections may be significantly lower than the Canned Salmon Industry imagines, the recipe can become even easier than it already was.
My favorite recipe, though, comes with a whole refreshing summer menu.
Honestly, other recipes have menus too, but I posted this one just because I was amused by "Young Hot Green Beans." It kind of makes me imagine the frustrated home cooks breathlessly watching shirtless green beans take a break to drink a can of Diet Coke.... Or maybe I'm confusing green beans with construction workers? But I digress. It's a refreshing summer menu! The main dish is Magic Salmon Mold! You know what that means. Fish Jell-O!
And this one is made with lime gelatin, not plain, so you know it's going to be oddly sweet and kinda green. Well, the illustration doesn't make it look green.
You might notice that the other pictures were actual photographs, though, and this is just an artist's conception of what canned salmon floating in lime gelatin over thin layers of sliced hard-cooked eggs and shredded cabbage might ideally look like. I suspect this is a tacit admission that Magic Salmon Mold is not much of a looker in real life.
Still, the booklet got me to think about canned salmon for a whole afternoon, so it must have some magic!
I'll admit to opening a can of salmon (not even chilled) and dumping some chunks of fish on top of a salad, but the rest of the recipes are an abomination as usual. it's a good thing that I'm a freestyle cook and that I didn't need a recipe to figure my salad out.
ReplyDeleteI just love the way the salad doesn't even try to disguise the fact that it's just a can dumped directly on the platter. So many of the old recipes go to great lengths to try to make things seem homemade and disguise the extent of packaged ingredients. This is unapologetically canned fish.
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