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Salmon, Mayonnaise Of
Mayonnaise of salmon consists of salmon boiled and then allowed to get cold, served with salad and mayonnaise sauce. It is a dish which is very highly esteemed, and one which affords ample scope for the display of the artistic faculty. The salmon may be boiled and dished whole, or it may be divided into flakes two inches long and an inch wide. Instructions for both methods are here given. The salmon may be boiled in the usual way, or for a superlative dish it may be dressed as follows. Put a moderate-sized carrot, sliced, into a saucepan with four shallots, a handful of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a sprig of chervil, a bay-leaf, a tea-spoonful of salt, and a slice of fresh butter. Steam the ingredients for four or five minutes, then pour in as much boiling water as will barely cover the fish, and add two glassfuls of light wine. Put in a piece of salmon weighing about five pounds, let it boil up quickly, skim the liquor, then draw the saucepan back a little, and simmer the fish gently till it is done enough; drain it, and leave it till cold. If the piece is to be served whole, dish it on a napkin, garnish round with small salad and crayfish, and stick prawns and parsley into the salmon with silver skewers. Send mayonnaise sauce to table in a boat. When the salmon is to be broken up, boil it, let it get cold, remove the skin and bone, and divide the flesh into pieces. Trim these neatly, and if plainly boiled, season each one with oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt. Trim and wash two large lettuces or any other salad. Dry the leaves perfectly by shaking them in a napkin held by the four corners. Put a layer of salad, finely shredded, in a bowl, place on this two table-spoonfuls of the sauce, and then part of the salmon, with a little more sauce, and repeat until all the ingredients are used. Ornament the top with slices of fresh cucumber, garnish the base with a border of hard-boiled eggs, prawns, etc., and let a trellis-work of beetroot rest upon the eggs. The decoration of this dish may be varied indefinitely. Make the sauce as follows. Put the yolk of an egg, freed from white, into a basin, add pepper and salt, and stir in very gradually about four ounces of oil. The oil should be dropped in at first, and the mixture well beaten between every addition. The success of the sauce depends upon this being done. After every eighth tea-spoonful of oil put in alternately a tea-spoonful of plain vinegar and a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar. The sauce should, when finished, have the appearance of very thick cream. Taste, and, if necessary, add further seasoning, and, if liked, a spoonful of chopped chervil, a spoonful of mustard, and a little anchovy. The seasoning ought as a rule to be rather high. Keep the sauce in a cool place till wanted, and do not dish the salmon until a short time before it is required. Probable cost of salmon, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound when plentiful. A mayonnaise by no means to be despised may be made from tinned salmon. When the fish is torn into flakes, three-quarters of a pound of salmon will make a dish sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian cold buffet centrepiece: poached salmon, either whole under a garnish or flaked into a layered salad, with hand-made mayonnaise. Most of the work is in the poaching liquor and the sauce.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropThe recipe is right that the whole sauce depends on this. Four ounces of oil (half a cup) to one yolk is a workable ratio, but the emulsion will break if the oil goes in faster than the yolk can absorb it at the start. Once a third of the oil is in and the mixture has visibly thickened, you can pour in a thin steady stream.
- Raw yolkThis mayonnaise is never cooked. For anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or shell eggs sold as safe to eat raw.
- "Steam the ingredients"This means sweat the sliced carrot, shallots and herbs in the butter over low heat with the lid on, four or five minutes, before the water goes in. It is a court-bouillon, and it is what distinguishes this from plainly boiled salmon.
- Two glassfuls of light wineGenuinely imprecise. A Victorian wineglassful was usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, sometimes 2.5, so two glassfuls means roughly 4 to 5 fl oz in all. A dry white is the likeliest reading of "light wine".
- "Boil it up quickly... draw the saucepan back"Bring to a boil, skim, then hold the liquor at a bare shiver, around 160-170F, with no visible bubbling. A five-pound piece needs roughly 8-10 minutes per pound at that temperature, or until the thickest part is just opaque through (around 135-140F for fish that will be chilled and flaked). Salmon boiled hard turns dry and squeezes out white albumen.
- CoolingLet the fish cool in the poaching liquor to just warm, then refrigerate. Cooling it out of the liquor, as the drain-and-leave instruction implies, dries the surface. Do not leave five pounds of cooked fish standing at room temperature for hours.
- Crayfish and prawnsThe garnish assumes whole cooked crayfish, once cheap in Britain and now not. Cooked shell-on prawns alone make the same effect. The silver skewers were called attelets and were decorative; small metal or bamboo skewers do the job.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth buying rather than substituting: the alternating plain and tarragon vinegar is what gives this sauce its character. Failing that, steep a few tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week.
- YieldThe book gives a figure only for the flaked version: three-quarters of a pound of salmon serves six. It gives no figure for the whole dressed piece.
In nineteenth-century usage a "mayonnaise" was a dish, not only a sauce: cold cooked fish or poultry dressed with salad and the emulsion, built up and decorated for a buffet or supper table. Cassell's places it among the set pieces where a cook was expected to show off, hence the trellis of beetroot, the border of eggs and the remark about the artistic faculty. The quoted price of a shilling to sixteen pence a pound puts salmon above the going rate for butcher's meat by weight, so this was an occasional dish rather than an everyday one, and the closing note about tinned salmon is a small piece of period evidence in itself: canned Pacific salmon was reaching Britain in growing quantity from the 1870s onward and was cheap enough to put a version of this dish within reach of households that would never buy a five-pound cut. The origin of the word mayonnaise is disputed and none of the competing stories is documented; the word is first recorded in French cookery writing in the early nineteenth century.