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Salmon and Green Peas
Take two pounds of salmon and cut it into three thick steaks, divide each steak into four pieces, lay them in an enamelled saucepan with a small spring onion, two sprigs of parsley, two sprigs of mint, a bay-leaf, and a pint of young green peas, and place over them a small cucumber cut into thin slices. Season with a little cayenne and salt, and add a scant half-pint of water, a glass of white wine, the juice of a lemon, a table-spoonful of vinegar, and a dessert-spoonful of moist sugar. Stew gently for three-quarters of an hour. Remove the onion, herbs, and bay-leaf. Dress the fish on a dish, garnish with the peas and cucumber, and pour the sauce over. Serve very hot with new potatoes.
A Victorian one-pot braise of salmon with the first peas and cucumber of the season. Everything in it is workable today except the cooking time, which will destroy the fish.
- The timing is the problemThree-quarters of an hour will take salmon well past dry and chalky. Simmer the peas, cucumber and aromatics in the liquid for about 15 minutes first, then slide in the fish and poach it gently for 6-8 minutes until it just flakes.
- A glass of wineIn cookery books of this period a wine-glass is usually reckoned at somewhere between 2 and 2.5 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup. Judge by the finished sauce rather than the measure; the lemon and vinegar are already carrying plenty of acid.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft sugar, closest to today's light brown sugar. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. It is there to balance the vinegar and lemon, not to sweeten the dish.
- A pint of peasAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so roughly two and a half cups of shelled peas; if buying in the pod you will need appreciably more by weight. Frozen petits pois work but should go in only for the last few minutes or they collapse.
- Why enamelledThe lemon juice, vinegar and wine will pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined copper. Enamelled cast iron, stainless steel or a non-reactive lined pan is the modern equivalent.
- Spring onion"A small spring onion" here means one whole scallion, white and green, used as an aromatic and lifted out at the end along with the herbs and bay.
- The cucumberSliced thin and laid on top, it steams to translucency rather than pickling. English or Persian cucumbers hold together better than the thick-skinned salad kind.
- YieldTwo pounds of salmon in twelve pieces serves four generously as a main course with the new potatoes.
Salmon and green peas was a fixed point of the English early-summer table, so entrenched that Victorian cookery writers treated the pairing as a matter of season rather than invention: wild salmon ran in spring and early summer, the first garden peas and new potatoes arrived at the same moment, and the three went to table together. This version is more ambitious than a plainly poached fish, cooking everything in one pan with cucumber, mint and a sweet-sour liquor of wine, lemon, vinegar and moist sugar. That sweet-and-sharp treatment of fish is an older idea, generally traced to the medieval and early modern taste for vinegared, sugared sauces with poached fish, which survived longest in dishes involving salmon and mackerel.