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Salmon, with Caper Sauce
Take several slices of fresh salmon, and let them marinade five or six hours in oil sufficient to cover them, salt, pepper, parsley, chives, and shallots, chopped fine; wrap the slices of fish in paper with all the marinade, and broil them; take them out of the paper, and send to table with caper sauce.
A Victorian paper-wrapped grill — essentially salmon en papillote cooked over coals rather than in an oven. The method is sound; the timings and the paper need translation.
- The hinge: the paperThe recipe says only "paper"; plain kitchen paper, well oiled, chars but protects the fish and traps the marinade. Parchment does the same job. Fold and crimp the edges so no oil escapes into the fire.
- Marinade timeFive or six hours is far longer than fresh salmon needs, and the salt in the marinade will begin to firm and cure the flesh. Thirty to sixty minutes in the oiled herb mixture gives all the flavour without the texture change.
- "Slices" means steaksCross-cut steaks about 1 inch thick, bone in, which is how salmon was portioned before filleting became standard. Fillets of the same thickness work, but keep the skin on for the grill.
- Oil "sufficient to cover"The recipe does mean enough oil to cover the fish. If you would rather not use that much, a shallow dish and turning the slices once or twice will carry the flavour, with roughly 1/2 cup of oil for four steaks.
- Chives and shallotsVictorian "chives" are the same herb; "shallots" here most likely means the shallot proper, though green onion tops will serve at a pinch. Chop everything very fine so it clings to the fish rather than burning loose in the packet.
- BroilingA medium-hot grill; the book means an open fire, and any oven figure is a modern substitution rather than anything Cassell's specifies. Allow 8 to 10 minutes for a 1-inch steak, turning once if grilling. Many cooks take salmon off at 125-130F internal for a translucent centre, though 145F is the temperature generally recommended as safe and gives a firm result. The old instruction gives no time at all, and overcooked salmon at these thicknesses is the usual failure.
- Caper sauceIn Cassell's this means a white sauce or melted-butter sauce with drained capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in at the end. Add the capers off the heat so they stay sharp.
- YieldFour steaks serve four as a main course, six as a fish course in the older multi-course sense.
Salmon with caper sauce was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English fish course, so standard that cookery books often gave the sauce and the fish separately and left the reader to combine them. Capers \em>Capparis spinosa, imported from the Mediterranean — were a familiar piquant condiment in a British larder, and their vinegar sharpness was thought to cut the richness of salmon in the same way that a wedge of lemon does now. What is less usual here is the treatment: cooking in oiled paper is a French technique, and Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled at a time when English kitchens were absorbing a great deal from French practice, prints it alongside plain boiled salmon. The long oil marinade points the same way, toward continental grilling rather than the British copper fish kettle.