Home › The Principles of Cookery › Salmon, Curried
Salmon, Curried
Cut two moderate-sized onions into slices, and fry them in hot fat till they begin to turn yellow. Mix a table-spoonful of curry-powder, and a dessert-spoonful of curry-paste very smoothly with a small quantity of good stock. Add more to make the quantity up to a pint, and pour it over the onions. Let all simmer gently for a few minutes, then rub the sauce patiently through a fine hair sieve, return it to the saucepan, let it boil, and put into it two pounds of salmon which have been divided into small square pieces convenient for serving. Skim the fat from the sauce, and simmer the salmon gently until it is done enough. A little garlic or lemon-juice may be added, or not. Serve with rice on a separate dish. The remains of cooked salmon may be curried, and will need only to simmer in the sauce until they are quite hot. Time to simmer fresh salmon, about half an hour. Probable cost, salmon, when plentiful, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward onion-based curry sauce with salmon poached in it. One instruction needs overturning outright, and the rest is mostly translation.
- Ignore the half hourSalmon cut into small cubes is cooked through in about 6 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer, and will be dry and chalky long before thirty minutes are up. Slide the fish in, keep the sauce just below a shiver, and pull it off when the pieces are opaque with a faint translucence at the centre. Reheating already-cooked salmon, as the recipe allows at the end, takes two or three minutes.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 imperial fl oz, roughly 570 ml or just under 2.5 US cups. That is a generous amount of sauce for two pounds of fish, which suits a dish meant to be spooned over the rice served alongside.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. Period spoon measures were not standardised, but a level modern tablespoon of curry powder is close enough.
- Curry-pasteCurry paste was widely sold ready-made in the Victorian period — ground spice worked into oil with tamarind or vinegar — though cookery books of the day also give recipes for making it at home. Any good jarred Madras-style paste stands in. The pairing of powder and paste is doing what a modern recipe does with whole spices plus a wet aromatic base: dry spice for perfume, paste for depth and acidity.
- Bloom the spiceMixing the powder to a slurry with stock and pouring it over the onions works, but the spice is better fried for a minute in the onion fat before liquid goes in. Raw curry powder simmered briefly in stock keeps a dusty edge.
- The hair sieveOriginally a sieve woven from horsehair; a fine-meshed metal strainer pushed through with a ladle is the modern equivalent. A blender does the job in seconds and gives a smoother, slightly thicker sauce; sieve afterwards if you want the old texture.
- Skim properlyFrying two onions takes a good deal of fat and it will pool once the sauce boils. Skim before the fish goes in, not after, or you will break up the cubes chasing it.
- Stock"Good stock" here would have been meat stock; a light chicken or fish stock both work. Avoid anything strongly gelatinous or the sauce sets on the plate.
- YieldFive or six as written, with rice. Add the lemon juice at the end rather than during the simmer — its brightness fades with heat.
Curried fish sat comfortably in the late-Victorian English repertoire, and Cassell's treats it as unremarkable enough to need no explanation: curry powder and curry paste were pantry staples by the 1870s, sold ready-made and used much as one would use a bottled sauce. The recipe opens with two pounds of fresh salmon, priced at 1s to 1s 4d per pound, and only in its closing lines turns to currying "the remains of cooked salmon" — a passing acknowledgement that the dish could also serve to turn yesterday's boiled fish into something that read as a fresh course. Serving the rice on a separate dish rather than under the fish was a common convention in English curry recipes of the period, and garlic appears here only as an option.