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Slices of Salmon Boiled
If a family is small and it should not be advisable to buy a large middle cut of salmon, it would be preferable to buy, for instance, two slices. Boil them very slowly in acidulated salted water, or in the court bouillon, with wine. Serve them with parsley between, and a napkin underneath. Serve a sauce Hollandaise in the sauce boat.
A method note more than a recipe: two salmon steaks, gently poached, dressed with parsley and served with hollandaise. The only real technique here is heat control.
- "Boil very slowly" means do not boilSalmon held at a rolling boil seizes, weeps white albumin and dries out. Bring the liquid up, then drop it back to a bare shiver at roughly 160-170F and let the slices poach with no visible bubbling.
- TimingThe book gives none. Steaks cut 1 to 1 1/4 inches thick will generally take somewhere around 8-10 minutes in barely trembling liquid; the flesh should just separate at the bone. Cooks who want moist, slightly translucent salmon pull it at 120-125F at the centre, though that is well short of the 145F usually recommended for fish, and anyone cooking for the very young, the elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised should go to the higher figure.
- Acidulated salted waterAbout a tablespoon of lemon juice or white wine vinegar and a tablespoon of salt per quart of water. The acid helps firm the surface protein; the salt seasons it, since poaching liquid otherwise draws flavour out.
- Court bouillonThe alternative liquid. A typical version is water with dry white wine, simmered beforehand with sliced onion, carrot, a bay leaf, parsley stems and peppercorns, then strained; the book's own proportions are not given here. Making it in advance matters, as the vegetables need longer than the fish does.
- SlicesPeriod "slices" of salmon are cross-cut steaks on the bone, from a fish that would have arrived whole. Bone-in steaks hold together far better in poaching liquid than a boneless fillet; if you use fillet, wrap it in cheesecloth or lay it on a plate to lift it out.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin under the fish absorbs poaching liquid so the sauce is not thinned on the plate. A warmed platter and a moment's draining on a towel does the same job.
- HollandaiseMade and held warm, not hot: it will break if it gets much above roughly 160F. Keep it off direct heat in a bowl over warm water and whisk in a spoonful of hot poaching liquid if it begins to tighten.
- YieldTwo steaks serve two, which is precisely the point of the recipe. Scale by the person rather than the pan.
Fish cookery of this period was organised around the whole salmon: a large middle cut, poached in a long fish kettle and sent to table on a napkin, was a set piece of a summer dinner. This entry is the concession to smaller households, and books of the period do trouble to distinguish the cut, since you bought what your family could finish. The napkin under boiled fish is an older convention than service a la russe, though the sauce boat passed separately is consistent with that style of service; the parsley laid between the slices is garnish in the older sense, a green edge rather than a flavouring. Hollandaise was by this date a common warm sauce for poached fish in English-language cookbooks, and is generally traced to French professional practice, along with vocabulary such as court bouillon.