To Broil Salmon
A Take two slices of salmon cut from the middle of the fish, sprinkle over a little lemon juice, cayenne pepper, salt and salad oil. Let it then remain for half an hour. Rub the gridiron well with beef suet or pork. As it is a nice matter to broil salmon without burning, it would be well to wrap it in buttered or oiled paper just before broiling. Serve with a maitre d'hotel, pickle, caper, anchovy or horse-radish sauce.
A straightforward marinated grill, with one nineteenth-century safeguard — the paper wrapper — that still works.
- The hinge: the paperThe paper -- the recipe offers wrapping in buttered or oiled paper as a precaution rather than a requirement ("it would be well to wrap it"). It keeps the surface from scorching over live coals while the flesh sets. Parchment does the job; ordinary greaseproof paper works if generously buttered.
- Cut and thicknessCut -- "two slices cut from the middle" means centre-cut steaks, cut across the fish. The recipe specifies no thickness or weight. Tail-end pieces are thinner and unevenly shaped and will overshoot before the centre is warm.
- Salad oilPeriod shorthand for a mild table oil, usually olive. Any neutral oil or a light olive oil suits; the quantity is a tablespoon or so per steak, enough to coat.
- CayenneUsed here as a background heat, not a chilli note. A pinch across both steaks is the intent, and the salt should go on at the same time — half an hour is short enough that it seasons rather than cures.
- Greasing the gridironRubbing the bars with suet or a scrap of pork fat is a non-stick measure. A folded paper towel dipped in oil, drawn over hot bars, does the same. Do it when the grill is hot, not cold.
- TimingThe original gives none. Over a medium-hot fire, roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side for a thick steak in paper is a reasonable guide; salmon cooked well past the point where the flesh just flakes turns dry and chalky.
- The saucesMaitre d'hotel is butter worked with parsley, lemon and seasoning, softened over the hot fish rather than cooked. Caper, anchovy and horseradish sauces of the period were all butter- or cream-based; any of them still suits grilled salmon.
- YieldTwo steaks serve two as a main course, or four if the fish is one course among several.
Salmon appears constantly in Anglo-American cookery books of the late nineteenth century, often in steaks cut across the fish — the standard fishmonger's cut for a large salmon, sold by the slice from the middle where the flesh is thickest and evenest — though the period also knew salmon whole boiled, crimped and pickled. Broiling over coals was the quickest way to cook such a slice, and the buttered-paper wrapper is a household version of something like what French cookery calls en papillote, used here as insurance against a fierce fire rather than for the steam. The list of finishing sauces is telling: maitre d'hotel butter, capers, anchovy, horseradish and pickle sauce, and offering them as interchangeable alternatives was the usual way these books gave a cook some latitude without printing several separate recipes.