Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Boiled Salmon
Boiled Salmon
Put the salmon in enough boiling water to cover, add 1 teaspoon salt to each quart of water; boil 1 minute, then draw on one side, and simmer slowly until cooked, allowing 10 minutes to the pound; drain thoroughly, and serve on folded napkin; decorate with parsley.
Serve with parsley sauce. For sauce. Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup milk, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste, stir till boiling, then boil 8 minutes, add 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, mix well and use.
A plain British-style poached salmon with a flour-thickened parsley sauce, written when salmon was cooked far harder than anyone would cook it now. The timing is the part to rethink.
- The timing is the hingeTen minutes to the pound will take a modern fillet or steak well past dry. Current practice is to hold the water at a bare 160-170F and cook to an internal temperature of about 125F, which for a thick centre-cut piece is roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness rather than per pound. A whole side or a large tail piece still benefits from being started in hot liquid and then left to coast off the heat.
- "Draw on one side"This means slide the pan half off the burner so only part of it sits over the heat, the standard way of holding a gentle simmer on a coal or gas range. On an electric hob, simply drop the heat until the surface barely trembles; the water should never break into a rolling boil after that first minute.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional volume, so the shortening appears everywhere. Butter makes a better parsley sauce and is what the dish traditionally used; substitute measure for measure.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch is enough — it is there to lift the sauce, not to be tasted as heat.
- The sauce is a thin bechamelThe sauce is a medium white sauce -- Two tablespoons each of fat and flour to one cup of milk is the standard medium proportion, giving a pouring-to-coating consistency. Eight minutes of boiling is longer than needed to cook out the flour but does no harm at low heat; stir often, as milk sauces catch. Add the parsley at the very end as directed, or it goes grey and loses its scent.
- Poaching liquidSalted water at one teaspoon per quart is the minimum. A court bouillon — the same water with a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, a sliced onion and a splash of white wine or vinegar — costs nothing and improves the fish considerably.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin on the platter absorbs the water that keeps seeping from poached fish and stops the presentation going soggy. It is a genuinely useful piece of service, not just decoration.
- YieldAllow roughly 6 oz of salmon per person as a main course. The sauce as written makes about a cup, enough for four to six servings.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook published by manufacturers to promote a single product — in this case Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening that Procter & Gamble introduced in 1911, which is why a vegetable fat rather than butter turns up in a sauce more usually made with butter. The dish itself is straightforwardly British: boiled salmon with parsley sauce was a common fixture of English and Scottish tables through the nineteenth century. The ten-minutes-to-the-pound rule reflects a period in which fish was cooked until it flaked freely from the bone and opaque firmness, not translucency, was the mark of doneness.