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SALMON, PICKLED (Cold Meat Cookery)
No. 1.--Take the remains of dressed salmon. Remove the skin, lift the flesh from the bones, and divide it into neat pieces. Make as much pickle as will cover the fish, composed of equal portions of vinegar and of the liquor in which the fish was boiled, and boil it for ten minutes with salt, pepper, and spices proportionate in quantity to that of the liquor. Let the pickle cool, then pour it over the salmon, and set in a cool place till wanted. In twelve hours the fish will be fit for use. Garnish with fennel or bunches of red currants, or a little lobster coral. No. 2.--Dissolve a slice of fresh butter in a stewpan. Put into this three moderate-sized onions, sliced, a turnip cut into dice, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, and a bay-leaf. Stir the ingredients over a gentle fire for four minutes, then pour upon them a pint of water and a pint of vinegar, and add two tea-spoonfuls of salt and one of pepper. Boil the pickle till the onions are tender. Put the dressed fish, freed from skin and bone and divided into neat pieces, into a shallow pan, strain the pickle over it, and set it in a cool place till wanted. The pickle may be used again and again if it is boiled up occasionally with a little fresh vinegar.
Two methods for turning leftover poached salmon into a cold pickled dish. Both assume the fish is already fully cooked; nothing here cooks raw salmon, so start with fish you have poached or baked yourself.
- "Dressed salmon" means cookedIn Victorian usage dressed means prepared and cooked, not raw and not sauced. Method No. 1 also depends on your having kept the poaching liquor, so plan it at the time you cook the fish rather than after.
- The liquorSalmon of this period was often boiled in a court bouillon (salted water with vinegar or wine, onion, herbs and peppercorns), though the recipe does not say what the fish was boiled in. If you poached in plain salted water it will work, but the pickle will be thinner in flavour; strain it before use.
- "Spices proportionate" is genuinely vagueThe original leaves the quantity to the cook. For a pint of vinegar plus a pint of liquor, a workable reading is a teaspoon of salt, a dozen peppercorns, a blade of mace, two cloves and a bay leaf. Method No. 2 gives real figures and is the safer of the two to follow.
- A slice of fresh butterAbout 1 oz (25 g). "Fresh" means unsalted, since the recipe salts the pickle separately.
- Cool the pickle before it touches the fishThis is the hinge in No. 1. Hot pickle poured over cooked salmon flakes will finish cooking them and turn the flesh dry and grainy; cold pickle keeps the pieces intact. Fully submerge the fish, or the exposed surfaces will darken.
- "A cool place" means the refrigeratorA larder at 50F is not a modern option. Keep it covered at 40F or below, and treat it as a three-to-four-day dish rather than a preserve — the vinegar is diluted by an equal volume of stock and is not strong enough to keep fish safely at room temperature.
- Do not keep reviving the pickleThe instruction at the end of No. 2 to boil the pickle up "again and again" with fresh vinegar belongs to a kitchen with no refrigeration and different expectations. Once it has held cooked fish, discard it.
- The garnishesLobster coral is the roe of a hen lobster, bright red once cooked and rubbed through a sieve; it is not something you will buy separately. Fennel fronds are the easy option, and red currants make sense in July, when both Scottish salmon and currants were in season.
- YieldThe pint-and-pint pickle in No. 2 will cover roughly 1½ to 2 lb of picked salmon — six or so servings as a cold first course with brown bread.
This entry sits in Cassell's run of "Cold Meat Cookery" articles, the section of the book devoted to what a large Victorian household did with yesterday's dinner: a whole poached salmon fed a table once and then had to justify itself again, cold, on the sideboard. Pickling was one long-standing answer. Salmon soused in vinegar and spice was a recognised British trade well before Cassell's — pickled salmon was packed in kegs and shipped from the Tweed to London — and related vinegar-and-onion treatments of fish appear across Europe, as in escabeche. Method No. 2, with its butter, onion, turnip and bouquet, is essentially a spiced vegetable pickle of the French kind, and its closing suggestion that the liquor be boiled up and reused indefinitely is a reminder of how differently a kitchen thought about keeping things before mechanical refrigeration.