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Salmon Au Bleu
Put some slices of salmon in a fish-kettle, with half a pint of port wine, carrots cut into slices, onions, also sliced, four cloves, two bay-leaves, a handful of parsley, two sprigs of thyme, and salt and pepper to taste. Let the salmon boil very gently until the flesh will easily leave the bone. Take off the skin when the fish is done, and mask it with a good butter sauce, in which put capers, sliced gherkins, and a little anchovy butter.
A wine-poached salmon in the Victorian manner, finished with a caper-and-anchovy butter sauce. Two things need attention: the liquid is far too little to cover the fish, and Victorian fish timings are roughly double what salmon wants.
- Half a pint of portAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. That will not cover slices of salmon in any fish kettle, so add water or a light court bouillon until the fish is just submerged; the wine is there for flavour and colour rather than volume.
- Fish kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lifting trivet, which is how the cooked slices came out whole. A wide sauté pan or roasting pan on the hob works, with a sling of doubled parchment or a flat spatula for lifting.
- "Boil very gently"Read this as a bare simmer with barely a tremor on the surface, around 160-170F. A true boil will squeeze the albumin out of the flesh in white curds and toughen it.
- TimingIgnore "until the flesh will easily leave the bone" as your only guide, which in practice means overcooked. Salmon steaks 1 to 1½ inches thick are done in 8 to 12 minutes at a simmer; the centre should still be faintly translucent and register 120-125F.
- MaskTo mask is to coat the fish with sauce thickly enough to hide it, not to pour a little over. Make enough butter sauce for that: a warm butter sauce or beurre blanc, or a plain white sauce enriched with butter.
- Anchovy butterMashed anchovy fillets or paste beaten into softened butter, whisked in off the heat at the end. It is salty, so season the sauce last and go carefully with salt in the poaching liquid.
- Gherkins and capersPeriod gherkins were pickled in vinegar and sharp rather than sweet, so use a sour pickle, not a sweet one. Rinse capers if they are salt-packed and slice the gherkins thin so they cut the butter rather than sit in it.
- YieldAllow one 6-8 oz slice per person. The recipe does not say how many slices, so scale the fish to the number of eaters and the aromatics to the fish. The poaching liquid is not served, though it can be strained and reduced into the sauce.
The name is borrowed rather than literal. Au bleu properly describes the trout treatment in which a very fresh fish, its protective slime intact, is plunged into boiling vinegar and water and takes on a blue-grey cast — which is why classic recipes insist the fish be killed at the last moment and never washed or scaled. Here the skin is stripped off and the fish masked in sauce, so nothing blue survives; the phrase seems to have drifted in English cookery books to mean any fish simply poached in a seasoned liquid. The dish illustrates a familiar Victorian approach to salmon: poach in an aromatic bath, then bury it under a rich compound-butter sauce with capers, gherkins and anchovy for sharpness. Port in a fish liquor looks odd now, though fortified wine turns up often enough in cookery of this kind.