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Broiled Salmon
Cut the slices an inch thick, season with pepper and salt, butter a sheet of white paper, lay each slice on a separate piece; enclose them in it with their ends twisted. Broil over a bright fire, and serve with anchovy or caper sauce.
A Victorian method that survives intact as cooking en papillote: the buttered paper is a shield against fierce direct heat, not a decoration. Everything depends on the fire being hot and the fish coming off early.
- The paperPlain "white paper" here means unglazed kitchen paper, buttered so it does not scorch through. Use parchment, and expect the edges to char over live coals; twisting the ends closed traps the steam and the fish essentially poaches in its own juices.
- Heat level"A bright fire" is a bed of coals burning clear with no flame; the nearest modern equivalent is a hot grill, or a gas grill on high with the lid down. A smoky or flaring fire will taint the parcel and burn the paper before the fish sets.
- TimingThe recipe gives no time. An inch-thick steak in the parcel will take roughly 4 minutes a side over clear coals, and the older habit of cooking salmon until it flakes stiffly leaves it dry. Modern practice pulls it at 120-125F at the thickest point for a translucent centre, or 135F for firm throughout.
- Cut of fishInch-thick slices means cross-cut steaks from a whole salmon, bone and skin included, as fish was commonly cut when this was written. A centre-cut fillet portion of the same thickness works the same way and is easier to eat.
- Anchovy saucePeriod anchovy sauce is a butter sauce, not the bottled condiment: a flour-and-butter roux thinned with fish stock or milk, finished with anchovy essence or two mashed fillets. Caper sauce is the same base with rinsed capers and a little of their vinegar.
- SeasoningSalt the steaks just before they go into the paper. Salted and left to stand, they weep and the parcel fills with liquid rather than steam.
- YieldOne slice per person; an inch-thick salmon steak runs 8-10 oz, which is generous. Serve the parcels closed and let them be opened at the table, with the sauce passed separately.
Broiling fish in buttered paper was standard practice in nineteenth-century English kitchens, where the alternative was laying a delicate fish directly on a gridiron over coals and losing half of it to the bars. Wrapping is usually credited to French technique, and by the time this book appeared the phrase en papillote was already in wider cookery use, but Anglo-American books tended to describe the method plainly rather than name it. The anchovy and caper sauces are equally of their moment: both were built on a butter-and-flour base and both rely on a sharp, salty note to cut rich fish. Salmon was still a seasonal river and coastal fish rather than a year-round farmed one, which is why a recipe this brief assumes the cook already has a fine piece and only needs to keep from spoiling it.