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Salmon Fillets, Fried
Cut the fish into neat fillets. Egg and breadcrumb these, and fry them in hot fat till they are done enough. Dish the fillets in a circle, and send tartar sauce, ravigote sauce, aurora sauce, or Indian sauce to table with them. By way of variety, the centre of the circle may be filled with oysters, prawns, or shrimps, mixed in Dutch sauce, with a further quantity of sauce in a tureen. Fried fillets of salmon are frequently served without sauce, and with the juice of a lemon strained over them. Time to fry, ten to fifteen minutes, according to the thickness of the fish. Probable cost, salmon, when plentiful, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound.
A straightforward crumbed-and-fried fish, but the timing belongs to an era when salmon was cooked until it flaked into dry curd. That is the one thing worth changing.
- The frying timeTen to fifteen minutes will overcook any fillet cut thin enough to crumb. A piece 3/4 to 1 inch thick needs roughly 3 minutes on the first side and 2 on the second, to an internal 125-130F, at which point the centre is still faintly translucent. The longer time in the original assumes thick cuts and a much cooler pan than a modern burner gives.
- "Egg and breadcrumb"The standard Victorian coating: dry the fish, dip in beaten egg seasoned with salt, then press into fine dry white crumbs. Modern panko crumbs are coarser and crisper; either works, but let the coated fillets rest 10 minutes before frying so the crust sets.
- "Hot fat"The fat is unspecified; in this period it would likely have been clarified butter, beef dripping or lard, and the recipe gives no indication whether the frying was shallow or deep. For shallow frying, aim for about 1/4 inch of fat at 350-360F; butter alone will brown too fast for a 5-minute fry unless clarified or cut with oil.
- "Done enough"An instruction that assumed a cook who could judge by the give of the flesh. Use a probe instead: the crust colours long before the interior is ready, so colour alone is not the signal.
- The sauces namedTartar and ravigote survive under their own names. Aurora sauce is a b ethaint el or velout el tinted with tomato; Dutch sauce is the period English name for hollandaise; Indian sauce is a curry-flavoured cream or velout el. Any of these can be found in a current sauce reference.
- SkinThe recipe does not mention skin either way. Removing it before cutting the portions makes the egg-and-crumb coating easier to apply evenly.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon 5 to 6 oz of trimmed salmon per person; the garnish of oysters, prawns or shrimps in the centre of the dish adds another 2 oz a head.
Cassell's is a dictionary rather than a menu, so a single fish arrives with a list of interchangeable sauces and the reader is expected to pick one — the same logic that produced dozens of near-identical entries for sole. The price note is the most telling line: 1s. to 1s. 4d. a pound "when plentiful" places salmon as a seasonal commodity in late Victorian Britain, cheap in the summer run and dear outside it, before refrigerated transport and, much later, farmed fish flattened the year into one long season. Serving the fillets in a ring with a garnish heaped in the middle is standard nineteenth-century table dressing, a habit inherited from French service and one reason so many recipes of the period specify a shape for the dish as well as a sauce for the fish.