Salmon Patties — The Friday Recipe Earl Jr. Remembered

Tax season. Every year Connie sits at the kitchen table with a calculator and a shoebox full of receipts and does our taxes by hand because she doesn't trust TurboTax and she doesn't trust accountants and she barely trusts math but she trusts herself more than any of the above. She's been doing this for twenty-six years. I offered once, in 1997, to help. She looked at me the way Betty looks at people who put sugar in cornbread. The offer has not been repeated.

While Connie did taxes, I did something I've been putting off: I started organizing the cookbook. Not writing it — organizing the raw material. I've got two years of blog posts with recipes scattered through them like gold flakes in a creek bed. I need to pan them out, sort them, arrange them into something coherent. Betty's recipes on one side. My recipes on the other. A chapter for beans. A chapter for bread. A chapter for meat. A chapter for dessert. A chapter for the things that don't fit anywhere, like the coal miner's lunch bucket entry, which is less a recipe and more a prayer.

I wrote out a table of contents on a legal pad. Twenty-seven recipes from Betty. Twelve of my own. That's thirty-nine recipes, which isn't enough for a book but is enough for a start. I need more. I need the recipes I haven't written about yet — Betty's chicken and rice casserole, her ham salad, her pickled beets, her leather britches beans (green beans dried on a string, rehydrated in winter, cooked with pork — a preservation method older than canning). I need recipes from my siblings, who each remember different dishes because memory is selective and family cookbooks are collaborative.

I called Earl Jr. He remembered Betty's salmon patties (canned salmon, cracker crumbs, egg, onion, fried in a skillet — simple, Friday food, because Pentecostals didn't eat meat on Friday, though they'd eat fried salmon patties with such gusto that the distinction seemed theological rather than caloric). I called Patsy. She remembered Betty's banana pudding and her blackberry jelly process. I called Bobby, the youngest. Bobby remembered Betty's fried pies better than I did — he's the one who used to steal them off the cooling rack, which Betty tolerated because Bobby was the baby and babies get amnesty.

The cookbook is taking shape. Not as a book yet — as a collection of memories wearing recipe clothes. Every dish is a person and a place and a moment, and the cookbook isn't really about food. It's about the kitchen in Evarts where a woman named Betty cooked three meals a day for fifty years and made every one of them count.

When I called Earl Jr. about the cookbook, salmon patties were the first thing out of his mouth. Not the chicken and rice, not the fried pies — the salmon patties. Friday food. Betty standing at the stove with a can of salmon and a sleeve of saltines and turning it into something none of us ever stopped wanting. So here they are, the way she made them, written down before the memory drifts any further from the skillet.

Betty’s Salmon Patties

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 10 minutes | Total Time: 20 minutes | Servings: 4 (makes 8 patties)

Ingredients

• 2 cans (14.75 oz each) pink salmon, drained, skin and large bones removed
• 1 sleeve saltine crackers, crushed fine (about 40 crackers)
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1/3 cup yellow onion, finely diced
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• Vegetable oil or shortening for frying (about 1/4 cup)

Instructions

1. Prep the salmon. Open both cans and drain well. Turn the salmon out into a large bowl and use a fork to flake it apart, removing the skin and any large bones. The small soft bones can stay — they crumble up and add calcium, and Betty left them in every time.
2. Mix the patties. Add the crushed saltines, beaten eggs, diced onion, salt, and pepper to the salmon. Stir with a fork until everything is just combined. Don’t overwork it. The mixture should hold together when you press it but still feel loose.
3. Shape. Divide the mixture into 8 equal portions. Shape each into a patty about 3 inches across and 1/2 inch thick. If the mixture feels too wet, add a few more crushed crackers. If too dry, add a splash of the reserved salmon liquid.
4. Heat the skillet. Pour the oil into a cast iron skillet and heat over medium heat until the oil shimmers. You want it hot enough that a pinch of cracker crumb sizzles when it hits the pan.
5. Fry. Place the patties in the skillet without crowding — work in two batches if needed. Cook 4 to 5 minutes per side until deep golden brown and crisp on the outside. Don’t press them down with the spatula. Let the heat do the work.
6. Drain and serve. Transfer the finished patties to a plate lined with paper towels. Serve hot alongside white beans, sliced tomatoes, or coleslaw — whatever Friday supper looked like in your house.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 340 | Protein: 32g | Fat: 16g | Carbs: 16g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 820mg