When I read Beatrice Hightower Cates’s 1936 Eliza’s Cook Book, I was surprised to find a recipe for salmon croquettes that refused to conform to a “heritage” mixture—that is, it didn’t have a roux-based white sauce to hold the croquettes together. In her book of recipes, collected from the ladies of the Los Angeles Negro Culinary Art Club, a luxurious combination of eggs and cream kept the fish mixture bound together during cooking. She rolled her flat cakes in crushed cornflakes for extra crunch, called them “salmon patties,” and served them perched on a slice of hot toast. Today, salmon croquettes are a staple on soul food breakfast menus.
But Cates wasn’t the only cook to take a detour with this beloved dish. Many black cooks who had migrated out of the South learned myriad makeshift ways to hold the canned fish mixture together. Some soaked bread in the salmon liquor from the can; some added mashed boiled potatoes or cheese, or cornmeal, or dried bread or cracker crumbs. The most common method was to simply add enough all-purpose flour to “tighten up” the mixture, as Sheila Ferguson explained in Soul Food: Classic Cuisine from the Deep South,“until Dad says, ‘it’s no longer juicy.’”
I owe inspiration for this modern interpretation to Stephanie L. Tyson, who, along with her partner Vivian Joiner, honored Stephanie’s grandmother’s memory in two Winston- Salem, North Carolina, restaurants and in the cookbook Soul Food Odyssey. The recipe comes together fast, and works well with left- over cooked salmon, poached fresh salmon, or canned salmon. Make the recipe as directed to serve as a first course, or make smaller croquettes and serve them in a chafing dish on the buffet.
Adapted slightly from Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin, copyright © 2019. Photographs by Jerrelle Guy . Published by Clarkson Potter, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.
This recipe was featured on our new cook-along podcast Play Me a Recipe. Listen as Home52 Editorial Lead Arati Menon flakes, breads, and fries her way through this recipe, sharing tips and stories along the way. —Food52
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