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Broiled Smoked Salmon
Take a piece of raw smoked salmon, wash it in 2 waters, rubbing off all the salt. Lay in a frying-pan with enough warm water to cover it; let it simmer fifteen minutes. Remove it, wipe dry, and lay on a buttered gridiron to broil. When it is browned on both sides, turn out on a hot platter, butter it well, and pepper it. Garnish with parsley.
This is a way of turning hard salt-cured smoked salmon into a hot dish, and the poaching step is the whole point: it draws out salt and softens flesh that is otherwise too firm and too salty to eat off the grill.
- What "raw smoked salmon" means hereThe book means heavily salted, cold-smoked salmon sold in firm dry slabs, closer to salt cod in texture than to anything in a modern deli case. Sliced lox or hot-smoked salmon fillet is already mild, moist and fully edible, and will fall apart if put through this treatment.
- Judge the salt, not the clockThe two washings and the fifteen-minute simmer are calibrated to a very salty piece. With a moderately cured slab, taste a flake of the poaching water after five or six minutes; when it reads pleasantly seasoned rather than briny, the fish is ready to come out.
- Simmer means barely tremblingSimmer gently -- a full boil will curl and split the piece before the salt has left it. The recipe calls for only enough warm water to cover the fish, held at a bare simmer.
- Gridiron equals grill or broilerA buttered gridiron over coals is a hot grate. A ridged cast-iron grill pan or a broiler rack set 4 inches under a preheated broiler both work; give the fish 2 to 3 minutes a side, only enough to brown.
- Wipe dry before it hits the heatA wet surface steams instead of browning, and it will stick to the grate no matter how well buttered.
- Add no saltPepper and butter only, as written. Even after desalting, the fish carries plenty of its own seasoning.
- YieldThe book gives no quantity. A piece of about 1 to 1 1/2 lb would serve three or four as a breakfast or supper dish. Lemon wedges are a reasonable addition to the parsley.
Before refrigeration, salmon reached inland tables chiefly as a preserved commodity: split, salted hard, and cold-smoked so it would keep for months. That product needed reconstituting before it could be treated as fish rather than as a relish, which is why nineteenth-century books give soaking and parboiling directions of the kind used for salt cod. Broiled salt or smoked salmon with butter and pepper appears as a breakfast and supper dish in British and American books of the period. The dish faded as cold chains and milder curing methods made fresh salmon and ready-to-eat smoked salmon widely available, so the desalting step that once defined the recipe now looks strange to cooks whose smoked salmon comes sliced in a vacuum pack.