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Salmon Pie, Cold, with Truffles
Cut two pounds of raw salmon into middling-sized squares, lard them with fillets of truffles and anchovies, season with salt and spice, fry them a few minutes with butter in a stewpan. Then pour over them half a glassful of sherry, which must be reduced; draw the pan back, add to the fish a pound of peeled raw truffles cut into quarters and seasoned, cover the stewpan, and let all the ingredients cool together. Chop very fine ten ounces of lean pork or veal, with the same quantity of raw pike or eel. Add to this mince a pound of fresh fat bacon, pound the whole together, and pass it through a sieve. Season well the forcemeat with salt and spices, and add to the above the trimmings of truffles, pounded with a little bacon, and passed through a sieve. Prepare a short paste, as in the recipe SALMON PIE, HOT. Butter a cold pie-mould of either round or oval shape, set it on a baking-sheet covered with paper, line it with two-thirds of the paste, and mask the bottom and sides with a thin layer of forcemeat; fill the vessel with the squares of fish, and the truffles and forcemeat mixed, arrange the preparation in a dome-shape fashion, rising above the rim of the mould, mask it with little slices of bacon, then with a thin round made with the remainder of the paste. Cover the pie, pinch, decorate, and give it a nice colour; put it into a moderate oven. Seven or eight minutes afterwards cover it entirely with paper; bake it for two hours; then remove it from the oven, and half an hour after having been taken out, pour into the hollow in the top two glassfuls of aspic jelly mixed with a little Madeira. A quarter of an hour later take out the mould, and let the pie cool for twenty-four hours previous to being served.
This is a cold pâté en croûte in all but name, and it behaves like one: the pastry is a container first and a crust second, and the whole thing is only finished a full day after it leaves the oven. Read the aspic and chilling steps before you start, since they determine where the pie spends its first night.
- The hinge: it is finished cold, not hotThe pie is baked through, rested half an hour so the filling settles and leaves a gap, then filled with aspic through the hole in the lid and left to set. Skip the aspic and you get a pie with a hollow centre and dry corners; the jelly is structural.
- Chill it, do not leave it outThe original's twenty-four hours of cooling assumes a cold larder. Cool the pie to room temperature, then refrigerate for the remaining time. A fish-and-pork forcemeat held at kitchen temperature overnight is not worth the risk.
- "A glassful"The glass here is presumably a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz, so half a glassful of sherry is about 1 fl oz, or two tablespoons, and the two glassfuls of aspic are about half a cup. The measure is genuinely loose; judge the aspic by what the cavity will take.
- Moderate ovenIn the region of 325–350F. The first seven or eight minutes uncovered set and colour the pastry; after that the paper cover stops it darkening over two hours. A thermometer into the centre should read about 160F.
- Fresh fat baconThis means unsmoked pork back fat or fresh green bacon, not modern cured smoked streaky. Smoked bacon will overwhelm the salmon and the truffle, and its cure will make the forcemeat taste like ham.
- Pike and eelBoth were valued here for gelatinous, sticky flesh that binds a forcemeat. Eel is still findable; for pike, whiting or additional salmon works, though the mixture will be slacker and benefits from being pounded cold and kept cold.
- A pound of raw trufflesAffordable when this book was compiled, and no longer. Preserved truffle, a smaller quantity of fresh, or good cultivated mushrooms with a little truffle product will carry the dish; the larding fillets are where the flavour registers most.
- SpiceUnspecified, as usual. In this period the phrase generally covered a pounded mixture of white pepper, mace or nutmeg and a trace of clove, of the same family as quatre epices. Season the forcemeat assertively; cold food tastes flatter than hot.
- AspicMake it from a fish or light veal stock set with gelatin, and add the Madeira after it is off the heat. It should be liquid but cool when poured, or it will melt the fat and cloud.
- YieldTwo pounds of salmon plus roughly two and a half pounds of forcemeat fills a large mould and serves twelve to sixteen as a cold course, cut in thin wedges or slices.
Cold raised pies of this kind sit at the top of nineteenth-century cold-table cookery: the pâté en croûte of the French professional kitchen, made in a pie mould, bound with a pounded forcemeat and sealed with jelly so it could be sliced days later at a ball supper or a buffet. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s, prints such dishes alongside plain family cooking, and the pairing of salmon with a pork or veal forcemeat is characteristic of French professional practice, where fish and butcher's meat were combined freely rather than kept apart. The pike and eel are not decorative: both were long prized for flesh rich in natural gelatin, which is why they turn up so often in quenelles and farces. The pound of raw truffle is a marker of date — French truffle harvests were far larger before the collapse of production in the earlier twentieth century, making truffles an ingredient grand kitchens could use by the pound rather than a shaving sold by the gram.