Salmon Croquettes with Mustard Sauce

All the home cooking going on this year seems to have sparked a renewed interest in an old Southern staple, the salmon croquette. I’ve seen them recently on cooking shows, I’ve participated in more than one Facebook discussion about them, and even Roy Blount, Jr. was talking about them in Garden & Gun a while back. Could it possibly be that salmon croquettes are suddenly . . . hip?

Let’s be honest. Any retro coolness aside, salmon croquettes are polarizing, even here in the South. Some people think they’re a treat, and some are put off at the very thought of them. My own late husband–as a condition of marriage–made me promise never to make salmon croquettes at home. It wasn’t enough to make them for the kids and make him something else, I was not to make them IN THE HOUSE. An unfortunate incident in the school cafeteria when he was in second grade had left him traumatized. I won’t detail that micro-horror here, but he’d no sooner leave town on a business trip than my girls would be asking if we could have salmon croquettes for dinner.

I love salmon croquettes. It’s true they exist in many forms, but the basic elements are the same–there’s the salmon, of course, plus a filler, a binder, and some sort of seasoning. A quick glance around via Google reveals a whole heck of a lot of variation from there. Salmon may be canned, raw, or leftovers from fresh. Fillers are usually fresh or prepared bread crumbs, flour, cornmeal, or a combination. I even saw some recipes calling for mashed potatoes. The binder may be whole egg, egg yolks, egg whites, a thick white sauce, heavy cream, or mayonnaise. Seasonings are all over the map: salt and pepper, certainly, but also herbs–fresh or dried, and aromatics like onion, celery, peppers, or garlic. Other flavors like lemon, lime, Worcestershire, hot sauce, mustard, Cajun seasoning, Old Bay, and sherry all appear frequently. No doubt I missed something; I only poked around through recipes for about five minutes. I have no idea how many hundreds of combinations you can make with that list, but the point is, you have choices.

I’m in the cornmeal and egg camp, as you will see from the recipe below. That’s how my mom has always made them, and so that’s how I make them now. I’ve made them with leftover roasted salmon and fresh breadcrumbs and they were good, but “leftover salmon” is sort of like “leftover wine” or “leftover chocolate”: I have no idea how that happened, but it will probably never happen again. I guess if I were cheffing in a nice restaurant I could start with raw fresh king salmon, run them as a dinner special, and charge $32.95 à la carte, but my kids just flat won’t pay that here at the house. And just so you know, Roy Blount, Jr. reported that William Faulkner’s favorite croquette recipe (nay, his favorite food) was the one on the back of the salmon can, and he liked his salmon croquettes covered in ketchup. (“Crazy for Croquettes”, Garden and Gun, August/September 2020.)

No shade intended toward the late, great Mr. Faulkner–culinary or otherwise–but I hope you’ll try the mustard sauce I’ve included instead. It’s a ridiculously easy refrigerator door sauce. (That means you just grab a couple of things from your refrigerator door, mix them together, and, Voilà!: a sauce.) It takes 2 minutes and is surprisingly versatile, and will keep for a couple of weeks in the fridge. In addition to salmon croquettes, it’s nice with ham, it makes a good glaze to brush on chicken breasts or pork tenderloin during cooking, it’s better on Reubens than thousand island or Russian dressing, and if you only have a tablespoon left, you can whisk it into a vinaigrette.