Vintage Recipe Roulette: 1981 Baked Salmon and Corn

Lots of cans and little detail make for a really fishy recipe...from a state that could use a helping hand right now.

My devotion to the terrible beauty of the 1981 First National Bank of Florida Inter City Offices Pot Luck Cook Book continues. Today, a real affront to the main benefit of living life in a Gulf Coast state* — fresh seafood. This recipe offers seafood from a can, in total defiance of all reason for a peninsular locale so surrounded by water that its state bird is the Saltmarsh Mosquito. But, although neither is associated with the state, Florida actually does produce aquaculture salmon and sweet corn, so I guess I’ll give this abomination a pass on that front.

As you can see, this is on the same page with the recent Pineapple Casserole, and they are sort of cousins in that each starts with a custard-like base and then adds something that 100% does not belong in there. Here are the main inadvisable ingredients:

Both the pineapple and salmon recipes also leave out a lot of information, so the chef is required to make some educated guesses. What sized cans? Corn comes in 8, 15, and 29 oz cans, and salmon comes in 5 and 14 oz. In the 80s, there was also a roughly 8 oz can of salmon, and I’m actually not sure it came in 5 oz at the time. I’m just going to bet that the recipe intended roughly equal amounts, and given the amount of egg and milk, that it intended the mid-sized 14 to 15 oz cans.

There’s also the matter of to drain, or not to drain. I elected not to drain the crushed pineapple last time, but this time, because there is so much liquid from the milk and so much in corn and salmon, I’m going to drain both. It also doesn’t say whether to melt the butter, but I will, because otherwise I think there will just be a big pool of it somewhere. I’m sure the original meant Italian breadcrumbs, but I don’t have any, and I don’t care. I’m using Panko. I’m also using just half of the recipe, because I need some corn for tonight’s taco salad, and I don’t need to eat a whole batch of this landlocked pantry casserole.

I actually love salmon croquettes and crab cakes, but those recipes often use a little mayo, and some actual flavoring, like green onion or Old Bay. This one is a real plain Jane — black pepper to taste is as spicy as it gets. No relish, no peppers, no fresh herbs. This is going to be bland, and bland leaves room for fishy.

Here are all the ingredients. I chose to halve the salt since my taste buds are no longer acclimated to early 80s canned casserole standards. After taking a photo with just the pepper…I admit it, I lost my nerve. I added about 1/3 tsp of Old Bay. After mixing, I had to take a few minutes to compose myself.

Outside…where I couldn’t smell it.

The banality of evil.

Another area in which this recipe is decidedly vague is the size of the casserole dish, which can have a huge effect on baking time, and whether to grease it. Although it means it takes detective work, I kind of love these recipe vagaries, because they mean this person probably learned the recipe from a parent or grandparent, and they use a dish of the size they were taught to use. They don’t tell you the size because they don’t know, and they may not even think it relevant. This kind of learning, warm hand to warm hand, is the way humans have learned everything for most of our history. It represents the best of us.

Or at least, it would, with a different recipe.

As you can see from the header photo, I decided to cut the baking time a bit and use single-serving dishes to try to increase the crispy bit-to-volume ratio, and I chose black to match the soul of the person who hath cast me into despair with this sensory deprivation tank of a recipe. It is hideously bland and almost textureless. It bakes up into a cake for sure — I could pop this right out of the dish, and it held its form. (If you didn’t drain the cans, it might be a lot moister? Like, salmon flan? Ugh.) The Old Bay I added barely made a dent in the featureless landscape of this flavor. It tastes vaguely of salmon and faintly of corn, especially when you get that slight textural reprieve of a kernel, but otherwise I would have thought this recipe came from the 1940s — specifically, the wartime ration years.

And, maybe it does. Warm hand to warm hand, remember?

So although I hate this recipe, I want to hold the warm hand that passed it to me. Let’s find its heart, and its best use. This is a relatively inexpensive way to get a high protein entree including heart-healthy fatty fish — less than $10 for the whole recipe at the time of this writing, assuming you choose store brands. If you have evaporated milk or shelf-stable plant-based milk, you could make it almost entirely out of the pantry at the tail end of your paycheck. The bland flavor profile is not for me, but it IS for a lot of other people, and it’s not very fishy. It reheats well. If you struggle with vegetable textures and strong flavors, or your kids do, you could make this and allow everyone to add a sauce of their choice to punch it up. Remoulade, garlic ranch, salsa, or even ketchup might make this more palatable, but a lot of sensitive palates out there would prefer it plain, and I get it. I had a palate like that as a child.

So, if you’re going to make this, I beg you to replace the salt with at least a teaspoon of Old Bay or other seafood-worthy seasoning, and it needs a little tang — maybe some jalapeno relish and minced onion, or replace some of the milk with mayo or Greek yogurt. Add garlic powder at the very least. I think I would prefer to replace the corn with a mix of celery, onion, and bell peppers. For the love of all that is good and holy, add a sauce.

And if you hate the co-workers who share the office microwave? It’s perfect for meal prep.

*Although fresh seafood is a huge benefit of life on the “Third Coast”, hurricanes are one of the huge problems, and this year has broadened that concern to well outside the historical norm. If you’re looking to donate for hurricane relief, I applaud you, and I hope you’ll check out this article about making sure your money gets put to best use where it’s needed most.

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