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SALMON, PICKLED (another way)
Cut the salmon across in slices about an inch and a half or two inches thick. Then rub each piece over with the following seasoning. Pound one ounce each of mace, Jamaica pepper, and cardamom-seeds, half an ounce of allspice, and a salt-spoonful of cloves; mix these with half a pound of pounded bay salt, and two grated nutmegs. Add also a little pounded bay-leaf and a very small quantity of dried and powdered mint. Rub this seasoning well into every slice of salmon, then cover each piece with yolk of beaten egg, and strew seasoning over it again. Half fill a small frying-pan with olive oil, and fry one piece of salmon at a time until it is of a rich yellow-brown colour. As each piece is fried, put it upon a hair sieve. When all are fried, let them drain until cold. Then put at the bottom of a stone jar a small branch of fennel and a little sprig of tarragon; upon these a layer of pieces of salmon, on these a bay-leaf, another little branch of fennel and another little sprig of tarragon, then pieces of salmon, then a bay-leaf; and so on until all the fish is in. Then pour in vinegar to an inch above the fish, and over this a thick layer of olive oil. Salmon pickled in this way will keep good for a year if required.
This is a nineteenth-century keeping recipe: fish fried, packed in a crock, covered with vinegar and sealed under oil, and expected to sit for a year. The seasoning is worth reading; the preservation method is not one to reproduce.
- Why it fails: oil over fishThe thick layer of olive oil is there to exclude air, and that is exactly the problem. Protein held under oil at room temperature, with no reliable acidity, is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without oxygen. Its spores survive frying, and while the toxin is broken down by prolonged boiling, nothing in this recipe would do that before the fish was eaten.
- Why it fails: unmeasured acidVinegar is poured in "to an inch above the fish" with no strength stated and no measurement of the finished pH. Frying and the salt rub do not acidify the interior of two-inch salmon steaks, and the vinegar cannot be assumed to penetrate them to a safe level.
- Why it fails: a year in a stone jarThere is no heat processing, no sealed jar, and no cold storage. Twelve months at larder temperature is far outside anything current guidance on home-preserved fish would allow, whatever the seasoning.
- Bay saltBay salt is sea salt evaporated in shallow pans, coarse and slightly grey, and has nothing to do with bay leaves. Half a pound of it here is a surface rub, not a measured cure, and the recipe gives no brining time or temperature.
- Cardamom-seeds and Jamaica pepperCardamom-seeds means the black seeds shelled out of the pods, not the whole pods. Jamaica pepper is allspice, which the recipe then also calls for by name half an ounce later; whether the writer meant two different spices or duplicated one is unclear from the text.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon was the small spoon that sat in an open salt cellar, roughly a quarter of a teaspoon; it is among the smallest measures such books use.
- If you want pickled salmonUse a current tested recipe for soused or pickled fish, one that specifies vinegar strength and refrigerated storage with a stated shelf life in days.
Pickling was the standard way of moving salmon around Britain before rail and ice made fresh transport routine: fish were caught in the Tweed, the Severn or the Scottish rivers, cooked, packed in vinegar in kits or stone jars, and sent to London and abroad, where "pickled salmon" was sold as a distinct article of trade. The style here, with its heavy spicing, egg-yolk coating and frying in olive oil, belongs to a slightly different and older tradition, the escabeche of Spain and Portugal, which reached English cookery books by way of the fried-and-soused fish dishes whose well-attested printed examples are eighteenth-century and are generally traced to Arab-Iberian practice. Cassell's, compiling in the 1870s and reprinting for decades after, gathered such recipes as a matter of record.