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Salmon, Kippered
This is a favourite breakfast dish in Scotland. After taking out the inside of the salmon, scale and split the fish; then rub it with common salt and Jamaica pepper, and let it drain for twenty-four hours. Mix together salt, coarse sugar, and a little saltpetre, and rub the fish well once or twice with this. Leave it in a tray to pickle for two days; then wipe and dry it, stretch it on sticks, and suspend it in the smoke of a wood or turf fire to dry. If less smoking is desired, the fish may be dried partly by the heat of a fire and the sun. Broil sufficiently to just warm through.
This is a cold-cure and cold-smoke procedure for a whole salmon, written for a household with a peat fire and no thermometer. The reasons it cannot be followed today are worth setting out in detail.
- No quantities anywhereSalt, coarse sugar and saltpetre are given only as "a little" and "rub well." Curing safety depends entirely on the ratio of salt to the weight of the fish, and on that ratio being even throughout a thick side; a rubbed-on cure judged by eye can leave the deep flesh well under the salt concentration needed to hold bacteria in check.
- SaltpetrePotassium nitrate is still used in some traditional cures, but modern practice restricts nitrate and nitrite to closely measured amounts, usually as a pre-blended curing salt, because the margin between an effective dose and a harmful one is narrow. "A little saltpetre" is not a measurement.
- Smoke that does not cookSuspending the fish in the smoke of a wood or turf fire is cold smoking: it flavours and dries but is unlikely to raise the flesh to any temperature that would cook it, and the recipe even allows drying by fire heat and sun instead. The burden of preservation therefore falls on a cure that is unquantified, in an uncontrolled drying environment where the fish sits for days.
- Clostridium botulinumSalted, smoked fish held anaerobically at cool but not cold temperatures is the classic vehicle for type E botulism, which is associated with fish and grows at refrigerator temperatures. Commercial cold-smoked salmon is produced under controlled salt, temperature and time specifications for exactly this reason.
- ParasitesWild salmon can carry anisakid nematodes and tapeworm larvae. Modern cold-smoking operations freeze the fish to a specified core temperature and hold time first. Nothing in this method kills them.
- "Broil sufficiently to just warm through"The final instruction deliberately stops short of cooking, so the eating temperature offers no correction for anything the cure and smoke failed to do.
- If you want to cure fishUse a current recipe with weighed salt as a percentage of fish weight, a specified curing salt, refrigerated curing, and a freezing step for parasites. Read this page as a record of how it was once done.
Kippering originally meant splitting, salting and smoke-drying a fish rather than anything to do with herring; the herring kipper of the breakfast table is the later and now dominant sense of the word, though the origin of the term itself is disputed. Splitting a salmon, salting it hard and hanging it in the reek of a peat or wood fire was one way of carrying a summer glut of fish through to winter, in the days before ice and rail let fresh fish travel. The instruction to broil the finished salmon only enough to warm it through is the giveaway that this is a preserved food, not a raw one: the fire at the end is for the table, not for safety.