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Salmon, Pickled
A whole salmon or part of one may be pickled, and will form a handsome dish, or, if preferred, the remains of cold boiled salmon may be preserved in this way. Recipes are given for both methods. No. 1.--Clean, scale, and boil a moderate-sized salmon in the usual way; drain it, and let it cool. Take equal parts of the water in which it was boiled and of good vinegar: let there be altogether as much as will cover the fish. Put the liquor into a saucepan, with a dozen cloves, a blade of mace, a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and a tea-spoonful of whole allspice; let it boil; skim it, stir a slice of fresh butter into it until dissolved, and pour it over the fish. Put it in a cool place till wanted. It will keep for some days if required. No. 2.--Put a whole fresh salmon or part of one into a large earthen jar, cover with equal parts of vinegar and water, add salt, cloves, pepper-corns, and spices, as in the last recipe, and lay one or two bay-leaves on the top of the liquor. Bake the salmon in a moderate oven. When the flesh leaves the bone easily on being lightly pressed with the finger the fish is done enough. Leave the salmon in the liquor in which it was baked, and set it in a cool place till wanted. If fresh vinegar is added, and the pickle is boiled every now and then, it will keep good for some time, and may be used again and again for the same purpose. No. 3.--Split a salmon open down the backbone, and divide the flesh into pieces about five inches square. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the pieces, and lay them in an earthen pan. Pour as much good vinegar over them as will cover them, set the lid on the pan, and put it in a moderate oven. Bake the fish gently until done enough. Keep it under the pickle until it is wanted, and serve with a small portion of the pickle in the dish with it.
Cassell's gives three versions of a very old British preserve, soused salmon. The vocabulary is easy enough to translate; the storage instructions are the problem, and they are what make all three unusable as written.
- The acidity is never measured, and it is dilutedNo. 1 thins the pickle with the water the fish was boiled in, and No. 2 with plain water, giving roughly 2 to 2.5 per cent acetic acid before the fish itself is taken into account. Salmon flesh is strongly buffered and low in acid, so the interior of a thick piece will sit well above the pH 4.6 that keeps Clostridium botulinum in check. Nothing in the recipe tells you the strength of the vinegar or the weight of the fish, so there is no way to work backwards to a safe ratio.
- "A cool place till wanted"In a Victorian house that meant a larder or cellar at perhaps 50-60F. Type E botulinum, which is associated with fish, grows at temperatures as low as about 38F and does so without oxygen, which is precisely the condition inside a covered jar of fish under liquor. Days of storage at larder temperature is the specific failure here.
- The butter seal in No. 1The butter in No. 1 -- Stirring fresh butter into the boiling liquor leaves a layer of fat over the surface as it cools, which would tend to exclude air. If anything that makes the anaerobic conditions under it more complete, and it does nothing to lower the pH.
- Reusing the pickleNo. 2 directs that the liquor be topped up with fresh vinegar, reboiled from time to time, and "used again and again for the same purpose." Each batch of fish dilutes and buffers the pickle further and adds protein to it. Boiling kills vegetative bacteria but not botulinum spores.
- No temperature is given for the fishNo. 2 judges doneness by the flesh parting from the bone and No. 3 only says 'until done enough', with no time at all, so the internal temperature actually reached is unknown. Combined with indefinite cool storage, that is a further uncertainty.
- If you want soused salmonUse a current, tested recipe with a specified vinegar strength and refrigerated storage measured in days, not a Victorian larder method. Do not adapt this one by eye.
- Reading the originalA "blade of mace" is one whole piece of the lacy aril from a nutmeg, usually reckoned as somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon ground. "Moderate oven" is not defined in the book; it is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350F. The "earthen pan" is a glazed earthenware or stoneware crock; vinegar will strip an unglazed or damaged one, and it must never be aluminium or unlined copper.
Soused or pickled salmon is one of the oldest ways the British dealt with a glut of a fish that spoils fast and ran in enormous numbers in the Tweed, the Tay, the Severn and the Irish rivers. Before rail and ice, cooked salmon packed in vinegar and spice travelled where fresh salmon could not: barrels and small kegs of pickled Berwick and Scottish salmon were a recognised trade good sent south to London through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The habit of serving it cold under its own spiced liquor, with the pickle spooned into the dish as No. 3 directs, survived after the preserving purpose had been made redundant by the ice trade and the railway, and Cassell's presents it as a handsome cold dish and a way of using up yesterday's boiled salmon -- though the text still claims the pickle will keep and can be used again and again. The clove, mace, peppercorn and allspice mixture is a standard English sousing spice of the period, used for mackerel and herring.