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Salmon, Tinned
Take the pieces from the tin, and pile them up dome-shaped on a dish, with a garnish of any green vegetables round the base. Vinegar, both plain and flavoured, should be sent to table, also black pepper and cayenne. As a rule, the fish is preferred free from the liquor in the tins. If required hot, put the tins in boiling water for about fifteen minutes, then open, and put the fish on a hot dish. Garnish as for ordinary boiled salmon. (See also SALMON PRESERVED.)
Less a recipe than a serving method, from a period when a tin of salmon was a modern convenience worth explaining. Most of it still works; one instruction does not.
- Do not heat the sealed tinRather than boiling an unopened can, open the tin and warm the contents in a covered dish or a small pan. It is easier to control, and avoids any question of pressure building inside a modern pull-tab can.
- The liquorDrain it if you want clean flakes for a cold dish, as Cassell's advises, but the packing liquid from salmon tinned in its own juices is worth keeping for a fishcake mixture or a sauce. Brine-heavy liquid from cheaper tins is best discarded.
- Bones and skinTraditional tinned salmon includes soft vertebrae and skin, both edible and the reason tinned salmon is a good calcium source. If you are piling the fish dome-shaped for the table, pick out the larger bone plates for appearance rather than safety.
- Piling it dome-shapedPress the drained flakes lightly into a small bowl lined with cling film, then invert onto the dish. Handled directly the fish breaks up and the mound collapses.
- Green vegetables round the baseIn this period that would typically have meant something like cold cooked peas, cucumber, watercress or shredded lettuce. A modern equivalent is blanched green beans or dressed cucumber, which cut the oiliness the same way.
- Vinegar, plain and flavouredFlavoured vinegars of the period commonly included tarragon, chilli and shallot. Any good wine vinegar infused with tarragon serves; sherry vinegar works too.
- QuantityA standard small tin drains to roughly 150-160 g, enough for two as a light lunch or four as part of a cold table. The original gives no tin size or number of servings, so judge quantities by the dish you are building.
Tinned salmon reached British tables through the Pacific canneries: commercial salmon canning is generally traced to the Sacramento River in the mid-1860s, and by the 1870s and 1880s Columbia River and later British Columbian and Alaskan packs were shipping in enormous quantities to Britain. That flood of cheap, keeping protein is exactly why an entry like this belongs in a late-Victorian dictionary of cookery — the reader knew what boiled salmon was, but needed telling what to do with a sealed cylinder of pre-cooked fish. The advice reflects the period's slight unease about the stuff: dress it up dome-shaped, ring it with something green, and put sharp vinegars and cayenne on the table so the diner can correct any flatness or tinny note.