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FISH, PICKLED (another way)
Make a pickle of boiling water and salt, strong enough to bear an egg. Plunge into this the fish to be pickled. Let it be well cleaned and trimmed, but the scales must not be removed, and there must be only just enough of the pickle to cover it. Be careful not to boil too much. Drain by placing it on a slanting board; and when cold pack it close, and fill an earthenware vessel with equal parts of the liquor the salmon or other fish was boiled in, and the best vinegar. Fill up again next day, and close the vessel.
This is a preserving recipe, not a dish to be eaten the same day, and it belongs to a period before anyone could measure acidity or hold a storage temperature. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method fails by current standards.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenCooked fish is packed cold into an earthenware vessel and kept at larder temperature with no measured salt, no measured acid and no heat process after packing. Both the brine and the vinegar do preservative work, but neither is quantified, so nothing about the finished pack can be verified; a poorly acidified, low-oxygen, protein-rich pack of fish is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum — including the cold-tolerant type E strains associated with fish — can produce toxin, which is undetectable by smell or taste. Use a current tested recipe for pickled fish if you want to make one.
- The acid is not controlledEqual parts of the fish cooking liquor and vinegar dilutes a 5 per cent vinegar to roughly 2.5 per cent acetic acid before the fish itself buffers it further. Modern pickled-fish procedures target a finished pH at or below 4.6 and verify it; nothing here gets anywhere near that assurance.
- "Strong enough to bear an egg"The old test for a strong salt brine: an egg floats at roughly 10 per cent salt or more, which is strong but well short of saturation. It tells you nothing repeatable, because egg buoyancy varies with the age of the egg, and the recipe gives no weight of salt, no weight of fish and no time in the brine.
- "Be careful not to boil too much"The only cooking guidance in the whole recipe, and it is a warning rather than a time. Fish is generally taken as cooked through at an internal 145F; in a brine this strong the surface sets quickly and the interior is easy to overshoot. But even correctly cooked fish does not make the subsequent storage safe.
- The earthenware vesselA glazed crock kept in a cool larder is what is implied here. Glazed earthenware, particularly old or imported ware, can leach lead into an acidic liquid, and a crock cannot be closed to a reliable seal in any case.
- Scales left onProbably not squeamishness: leaving the scales and skin on would help hold the fish together through boiling and handling, so it reaches the crock intact rather than flaking apart. The recipe itself gives no reason.
- Draining on a slanting boardA sensible instruction that survives: the fish is drained thoroughly so that no water dilutes the pickle. The "fill up again next day" step presumably makes good liquid absorbed or displaced overnight.
Pickled salmon was one of Britain's great commercial preserves before refrigeration. Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Tyne shipped boiled, vinegar-pickled salmon south in wooden kits through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and "Newcastle salmon" was a recognised article of trade. Cassell's carries the method as an alphabetical dictionary entry, headed "FISH, PICKLED (another way)", and the recipe itself specifies only "salmon or other fish". The vagueness that makes it unusable now is characteristic of the genre: it assumes a cook who has watched it done.