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Salmon, Dried, Kippered, or Salted
Cut a moderate-sized salmon down the back, empty, scale, and wash it. Rub it inside and out with common slat, and let it hang to drain for twenty-four hours. Mix thoroughly one ounce of pounded saltpetre with two ounces of bay salt, and one ounce of common sugar. Rub the salmon with this mixture in every part, lay it on a large dish, cover it with salt, and let it lie for two days. Turn it over, and rub it again with common salt, and in twenty-four hours it will be fit for drying. Wipe it well, stretch it open with two sticks, and hang it in a dry cool place; or if it is to be smoked, hang it in a chimney or smoke-house. It may be used in a few days.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke method for whole salmon, and it belongs to a period before anyone measured nitrate residues or thought about Clostridium botulinum type E. The vocabulary is worth understanding, but the process is not one to reproduce.
- No weight, no dose"A moderate-sized salmon" could mean anything from four pounds to fifteen, yet the cure is fixed at one ounce of saltpetre. Nitrate in a cure has to be calculated against the weight of the flesh; an unstated fish weight makes the dose unknowable, and at the small end of the range it is well above any figure permitted today.
- SaltpetrePotassium nitrate, sold loose by grocers and chemists in the nineteenth century. Modern curing salts are deliberately diluted mixtures precisely because pure nitrate and nitrite are easy to overdose, and current curing guidance specifies the dose by weight of meat.
- Nothing reaches a safe temperatureThe fish is salted, dried and hung, or smoked in a chimney. A domestic chimney or smoke-house would have sat somewhere between ambient and warm; the interior of the salmon never gets hot, and never gets cold enough to be refrigerated either.
- Botulism in cured fishType E botulinum is associated with fish and with cold-smoked and salted fish in particular. It grows in low-oxygen, low-acid conditions at refrigeration temperatures, which is exactly what the interior of a lightly cured, unrefrigerated side of salmon provides. This is the specific reason commercial cold-smoked salmon is made under controlled brine concentration and temperature.
- ParasitesWild salmon carries anisakid nematodes. Modern practice for any salmon that will not be cooked through is a commercial freezing step at defined temperature and duration before curing. Salt alone at these levels is not reliable against them.
- "Fit for drying" in three daysThree days of dry salting on a whole fish gets salt into the outer flesh, not the deep muscle along the backbone. "It may be used in a few days" leaves the thickest part of the fish barely cured.
- Bay saltCoarse sea salt made by solar evaporation, the name usually traced to salt imported from the Bay of Biscay; larger-crystalled and less pure than table salt, and traditionally said to dissolve more slowly, which is the reason usually given for preferring it in dry curing. "Common salt" is ordinary everyday salt; "common sugar" the ordinary cheap sugar of the day.
- If you want cured salmonUse a current recipe with stated fish weight, stated cure percentages, a stated freezing step and a stated holding temperature. This entry is worth reading as a record of method, not as a set of instructions.
Dried, kippered and salted salmon were among the usual conditions in which inland Britons met the fish before the railway and the ice trade. The word kipper is used here in its older, wider sense of a fish split, salted and smoked — it attached itself permanently to herring only later, and in Scotland a "kippered salmon" was a well-known product of the great netting rivers. Preserving a glut was still a household job: a salmon bought whole at the height of the run had to be turned into something that would keep, and the technique here is essentially the same salt-and-nitrate dry cure applied to bacon and beef elsewhere in the book. Saltpetre appears in many of them, valued for the red colour it fixed in the flesh as much as for its preserving effect, and it was sold across the counter with little formality.