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Salmon Collops
Cut the salmon into thin collops. Season with pepper and salt, and fry them in a pan with a little butter. Place them in a dish, and serve with the following sauce. Take a spoonful of fennel, mint and parsley, boil them five minutes, and chop them fine. Mix with them half a pint of bechamel and a little glaze. Season with salt, a little cayenne, and a squeeze of lemon.
A brief entry that assumes a cook who already knows how to make béchamel and keep glaze in the larder. Two things need attention: the thickness of the collops and the five-minute boil given to the herbs.
- CollopsA collop is simply a thin slice cut across the grain, here from a skinned fillet or from a boned steak. About 1/4 to 1/3 inch is right; anything thicker will not cook through in the short time butter in a pan allows.
- Frying timeThe recipe gives none. Slices this thin need roughly a minute a side over medium-high heat, and should come out still faintly translucent at the centre. Salmon held past that goes dry and begins to weep white albumen.
- The herbs"Fennel" here most likely means the feathery green fronds rather than the bulb, which was not then the common English vegetable it is now. Five minutes' boiling would soften stalky garden herbs, though it does little for the colour; with modern bunches, thirty seconds in boiling water then a squeeze dry is enough, or skip the blanching and chop them raw.
- A spoonfulGenuinely ambiguous, and it is not clear whether a spoonful of each herb or of the three together is meant. Take it as roughly a tablespoon of chopped herbs in total for the quantity of sauce given, and adjust to taste rather than trying to pin the Victorian spoon down.
- Half a pint of bechamelAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so a scant 1 1/4 US cups. Make it with fish stock or half stock and half milk if you want it to sit with the salmon rather than beside it.
- GlazeMeat or fish stock reduced to a syrup, kept as a jelly in the larder. A teaspoon of good demi-glace, or a few tablespoons of fish fumet boiled down hard, does the same job: it darkens and deepens the sauce without thinning it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities of fish or number of servings. As a rough guide, this much sauce will carry something like 1 1/2 lb of salmon, enough for four as a main course.
Collop is one of the older words in English cookery, in use by the fourteenth century for a thin slice of meat cut for quick frying — the same word behind "Collop Monday," the Shrovetide day for eating up the bacon before Lent. Applying it to fish is a later extension. The herb sauce is more interesting than the frying: fennel with salmon is one of the long-lived English pairings, recorded in medieval and Tudor kitchens well before béchamel arrived to carry it, and here the old green sauce has simply been folded into a French white one, with glaze and cayenne added in the manner of the period. Salmon in the later nineteenth century was still a seasonal river fish, and reportedly more ordinary in some northern towns than its modern reputation suggests, which may be why the book treats it as material for a quick fried supper dish rather than an occasion.