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Salmon, Collared
Split a salmon. Cut off the head and tail parts, scale, bone, wash, and dry the fish perfectly. Into a piece weighing four pounds rub a savoury powder made of two tea-spoonfuls of salt, a tea-spoonful of white pepper, a salt-spoonful of powdered mace, and a pinch of cayenne. Roll the salmon up, and bind it firmly; put it in a fish-kettle, cover it with vinegar and cold water, putting two parts of water to one of vinegar, and add two or three bay-leaves and a little pepper and salt. Cover the saucepan, and let the fish simmer gently till it is done enough. Serve cold with anchovy sauce or melted butter; and in order to preserve the fish, keep it covered with the liquor in which it was boiled, and pour into this a little additional vinegar. Time to boil, about an hour. Probable cost, salmon, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound when in full season.
Collaring is poaching a rolled fillet in a sharp vinegar court-bouillon and serving it cold. The technique is sound; only the keeping instructions at the end belong to a world without refrigeration.
- The hinge: stop cooking by temperature, not the clockThe book itself says to simmer 'till it is done enough' and offers the hour only as a rough guide. A tight 4 lb roll is likely done in roughly 30-40 minutes at a bare shiver, at about 140F at the centre of the roll; check the temperature rather than trusting the clock.
- Buying the fishRather than splitting a whole salmon, ask for a single boned side, skin on, about 4 lb. Run your fingers along the flesh for pin bones and pull them with pliers; the roll will not slice cleanly otherwise.
- Salt-spoon and tea-spoonA salt-spoon is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning comes to roughly 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp white pepper, 1/4 tsp ground mace, and cayenne to taste. Mace is the aril, the outer sheath of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet; ground nutmeg used sparingly is the nearest substitute.
- Binding the collarRoll the seasoned side from the thick end, wrap it firmly in a double layer of muslin or cheesecloth, and tie at intervals with kitchen string. Without the cloth the roll relaxes and the seasoning washes out into the liquor.
- The fish-kettle and the pickleAny pan long enough to hold the roll flat and submerged will do; a deep roasting tin on the hob, covered with foil, works. Two parts water to one of vinegar is very sharp by modern taste; the recipe does not name the vinegar, though malt was the usual English kitchen vinegar of the period, and cider vinegar gives a gentler result.
- Melted butter and anchovy sauce"Melted butter" in a Victorian book means the English flour-thickened butter sauce, not clarified butter. Anchovy sauce is the same sauce with anchovy essence stirred in; a mayonnaise sharpened with anchovy suits a cold dish better.
- Ignore the keeping instructionStoring the cooked fish submerged in its topped-up liquor at larder temperature was a preservation method for a cold house; the recipe gives a rough proportion of two parts water to one of vinegar, but that is not a measured or reliable cure. Chill the collar in the liquor, then refrigerate it and eat within two or three days.
- Yield and servingA 4 lb collar cut in half-inch rounds serves eight to ten as a cold course. Slice it cold and firm, straight from the refrigerator, or the spiral falls apart.
- The price lineOne shilling to 1s 4d a pound is the in-season price the book quotes, and places the dish in a comfortable household rather than a thrifty one.
To "collar" is to bone a piece of meat or fish, season it, roll it into a collar and bind it - a preserving technique that runs through English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, applied to eel, pig's head (as brawn), breast of veal, beef flank and, in the salmon rivers of the north, to salmon. The vinegar bath does double duty, seasoning the fish and acidifying it so it would keep some days in a cool larder, which is why collared and soused fish appear so often on supper tables and in picnic hampers before domestic refrigeration. Pickled salmon was a genuine article of trade: casks of it were shipped south from the Tweed and the Tyne to London through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cassell's includes the recipe as one of a long run of salmon entries.