Home › The Principles of Cookery › Salmon Caveach
Salmon Caveach
Take one or more slices of salmon half an inch thick; broil these according to the directions already given. Let them cool, then put them into an earthen pan, and pour over the fish as much vinegar as will entirely cover it. The vinegar should have been boiled with two heads of shallots, two cloves, a small blade of mace, a quarter of an ounce of whole pepper, and a little salt to each quart. Pour over the top as much oil as will cover the vinegar, and put the salmon aside till wanted. Time, fifteen minutes to broil the fish. Probable cost of salmon, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound, when plentiful.
A Victorian keeping-dish: broiled salmon steeped in spiced vinegar and sealed under a layer of oil so it could be held "till wanted". The method as printed cannot be recommended, but the vocabulary and proportions are worth reading closely.
- Why this one failsThe oil cap is the problem. It creates an oxygen-free layer over cooked fish that is then held at an unspecified temperature for an undefined period, which is the kind of condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate and produce toxin. Broiling kills bacteria but not spores.
- No measured acidityPreservation here rests entirely on vinegar of unstated strength penetrating half-inch salmon steaks. Nineteenth-century vinegars varied widely, and the recipe gives no target pH, no weight of fish to volume of pickle, and no holding temperature. There is nothing to verify against, so a current tested recipe should be used instead.
- "Till wanted"The original assumes a cold larder and a cook who knows by eye and nose when fish has turned. No shelf life is given at all, which is the single largest gap in the instructions.
- Two heads of shallotsA "head" is a whole shallot bulb, which may divide into two or three cloves. Rather more allium than the phrase suggests to a modern ear.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg; a "blade" is one dried fragment of that aril, not ground mace. Roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in for it, though the flavour is coarser.
- A quarter of an ounce of whole pepperAbout 7 g, or a rounded tablespoon of peppercorns, per quart of vinegar. A quart in an English book of this date is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz rather than 32.
- The earthen panA glazed earthenware crock, chosen because it does not react with vinegar. Any modern glass or glazed ceramic vessel serves the same purpose; bare metal does not.
- The price noteOne shilling to 1s 4d a pound marks salmon as comparatively cheap when in season, as the recipe's "when plentiful" indicates, though still a real expense for many households. The "probable cost" line gave a housekeeper some measure of what a dish would run to.
"Caveach" is the English mangling of the Spanish and Portuguese escabeche, a vinegar pickle for fried or grilled fish that is generally traced back through Iberia to the medieval Arab sikbāj, a sweet-sour meat stew. It entered English cookery books in the eighteenth century, most often applied to mackerel, and was carried into the nineteenth as a way of keeping oily fish edible for days rather than hours in a house without ice. In London the technique overlapped with the fried-fish-in-vinegar tradition of the city's Sephardi and later Ashkenazi communities. Its appearance under salmon in Cassell's reflects a period when netted salmon arrived in quantity and had to be dealt with quickly; the same glut that made the fish cheap made preserving recipes necessary.