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SALMON, COLLARED (another way)
Take a slice of salmon, cut off a handful of the tail, wash the large piece well, and dry it with a clean cloth; rub it over with the yolks of eggs, and then make a forcemeat with what has been cut off the tail (but take off the skin), and put to it a handful of parboiled oysters, the yolks of three or four eggs boiled hard, six anchovies, a handful of sweet herbs chopped small, a little salt, some cloves, mace, nutmeg, pepper, and grated bread; work all these items thoroughly together into a body, and lay it all over the salmon; roll it up into a collar, and bind it with broad tape: then boil it with salt and vinegar in the water--let the liquor boil before the fish is put in--let it continue to simmer gently till done. It will take nearly two hours' boiling; when it is done enough, take it up and put it into a deep pan. When the liquor is cold, put it to the salmon; let it stand till it is wanted for use. Or it may be put into a pot that will just hold it, and clarified butter poured over it.
A collar is a boned fillet rolled around a stuffing, bound, and poached in acidulated water to be eaten cold. Nearly all of the original's instructions hold up; the boiling time does not.
- Two hours is the one figure to ignoreA rolled salmon collar of two to three pounds is cooked through in 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer, and the internal temperature should reach about 145F. Two hours turns the fish to cotton and squeezes the forcemeat out of the roll.
- "A slice of salmon" means a long filletYou want a centre-cut fillet, skin on, of roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb, thin enough to roll. The "handful of the tail" cut off is simply the thin tail end, skinned and used for the stuffing, so buy a whole side and work back from the tail.
- Broad tapeUndyed cotton tape or butcher's twine at one-inch intervals, or roll the collar in a double layer of cheesecloth and tie the ends. Bind it tight: a slack collar unrolls in the pot and the forcemeat disperses into the liquor.
- The oystersParboiled here means dropped into their own liquor for under a minute, only until the edges ruffle. Anything longer and they are rubbery lumps in the stuffing before the collar has even been poached.
- Anchovies and sweet herbsSix anchovies means six salt-cured fillets, worth rinsing; about two teaspoons of anchovy paste stands in. "Sweet herbs" in period English cookery usually meant some combination of parsley, thyme and marjoram -- no more than a couple of tablespoons chopped in total.
- Grated breadGrated from a firm or day-old loaf rather than a soft fresh crumb. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture holds together when pressed; "work into a body" is asking for a paste stiff enough to spread without sliding.
- The cooking liquorRoughly 1/4 cup vinegar and a tablespoon of salt per quart of water, deep enough to cover. Bringing it to the boil before the fish goes in, as directed, sets the outside quickly and helps the collar keep its shape.
- Storage, and its limitCooling the collar in its own liquor is sound practice and gives a lightly jellied surround. But treat the finished dish as a cooked leftover: refrigerate it and eat within three days. The pot sealed under clarified butter was a Victorian larder method that relied on cool cellars and short intervals, and it is not a preserve by modern standards.
- YieldA 2 lb collar cut into half-inch rounds serves six to eight as a cold first course, with brown bread and a sharp cucumber salad.
Collaring was one of the standard English ways of making a large fish or a cheap cut of meat keep and travel: bone it, roll it around seasoning, bind it, cook it in vinegared water, and store it in the acid liquor or under fat. Collared eel, collared beef and collared pig's head all appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English books. The forcemeat here, with its oysters, anchovies, hard yolks and the triad of cloves, mace and nutmeg, belongs to the older English tradition of Hannah Glasse's era rather than to anything invented in the 1870s.