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Salmon, Cured or Salted
Split open and bone the fish. Wipe it with a soft cloth, sprinkle salt over it, and leave it for twenty-four hours. Pour off the liquor, wipe the fish dry, cut it into pieces of a convenient size, rub these well with pounded saltpetre, and pack closely in a pot, with salt between the layers. If the salt is not dissolved in three or four days make a strong brine, and pour it, when cold, over the fish, which must be kept covered with the liquor.
This is a nineteenth-century preservation method, not a cooked dish, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the language and then why the process fails current standards.
- Saltpetre in unmeasured quantity"Pounded saltpetre" is potassium nitrate, rubbed on by feel with no weight given. Nitrate and nitrite curing salts are now used at strictly controlled parts-per-million against the weight of the fish, because excess is toxic and inadequate amounts leave the cure ineffective. The recipe says only to "rub these well" with it, which is outside any usable range.
- No brine strength, no temperatureA "strong brine" made by eye may be anywhere from barely preserving to fully saturated, and the recipe never says where the pot is kept. Salt cures depend on measured salinity and a held temperature; without both, the fish spends days in the range where spoilage and pathogenic organisms grow.
- Salt-cured fish and botulismFish packed under liquid in a covered crock is exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum, including the cold-tolerant type E strains associated with fish, can produce toxin. The product is never heated at any stage, so nothing in the method would destroy it.
- ParasitesWild salmon can carry nematodes and tapeworm larvae. Modern practice for fish that will not be cooked is a defined commercial freezing step before curing; this recipe has no equivalent, and salt alone at unknown concentration is not a reliable kill step.
- What the words mean"Liquor" here is simply the brine the salt draws out of the flesh, not spirits. The "pot" is unspecified, most likely an earthenware crock or similar vessel, and "split open and bone" means opening the whole fish along the backbone rather than cutting steaks.
- If you want salt salmonUse a current, tested recipe for gravlax or salt-cured salmon that specifies weights of salt and sugar, a curing temperature, a time, and a prior freezing step for the fish.
Before refrigeration, salting was how a glut of salmon became food for the rest of the year, a household preservation technique rather than a dish. Salted and barrelled salmon was a substantial trade in Britain and Ireland from the medieval period onward, shipped from the great netting rivers to inland markets and abroad; saltpetre, added to cures from at least the seventeenth century, was valued because it kept the flesh a good red colour as well as helping the cure, an effect cooks observed long before the nitrite chemistry behind it was understood. Recipes of this kind assume a cool larder, a glazed crock and a cook who has watched someone else do it, which is precisely the knowledge that modern published cures replace with numbers.