Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Pickled Salmon
A ten pound salmon I small red pepper 2 quarts of good cider vinegar 12 pepper-corns 4 blades of mace 12 whole cloves I small onion 2 bay leaves 2 tablespoonfuls of whole mustard 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar ½ pint of boiling water Clean the salmon and wash it well in cold water. Put it into a kettle, cover it with boiling water, add a tablespoonful of salt and boil fifteen minutes to every pound. If you have to cut your fish, boil only ten minutes to every pound. When done, drain, wipe dry and stand in a cold place over night. In the morning take off the skin and cut the flesh into nice convenient pieces. Put the vinegar and all the other ingredients into a porcelain kettle and bring them to a boil. Now drop the salmon carefully into this and let all boil up once. Rinse six or seven air-tight glass jars with hot water, carefully take the salmon from the kettle with a spoon, drop it rapidly into a jar, until it will hold no more; now fill with the boiling liquor to the very brim, screw on the top and stand to one side. Proceed in this manner until all the jars are filled. Then wipe them off; see that they are all screwed up well. Stand in a cool, dark, dry place and it will keep good for a year.
This is a home-preserving procedure, not a dish eaten the day it is made, and the method it describes has no place in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- Open-kettle sealingThe jars are filled with boiling liquid and screwed shut with no processing afterwards — the technique known as open-kettle or hot-fill-and-seal. The seal it produces is unreliable and nothing in the sequence sterilises the jar contents or the headspace. This alone rules the recipe out; current USDA guidance abandoned the practice for all foods decades ago.
- Acidity is not controlledTwo quarts of cider vinegar sound aggressive, but a pint and a half of water is added to it, and a ten-pound salmon carries a great deal of its own moisture into the jar. Nothing in the recipe measures or verifies the final acidity, so there is no way to know whether the packed fish sits in the acid range that suppresses Clostridium botulinum. Fish is a low-acid, high-protein, low-oxygen environment — exactly the conditions the organism wants.
- A year at room temperatureThe instruction is to stand the jars in a cool dark place and expect them to keep twelve months. Botulinum toxin develops without gas, cloudiness, off smell or any other sign the cook could detect, so "it kept well" is not evidence that a jar was safe. Vinegar-pickled fish today is treated as a refrigerated product with a short life, not a shelf-stable one.
- Not a matter of cleanlinessRinsing the jars with hot water, as directed, does not sterilise them, and even sterile jars would not help: the spores of concern arrive with the fish and survive boiling. Careful work at the bench cannot compensate for the absence of a measured thermal process.
- The cooking time, for the recordFifteen minutes per pound on a ten-pound fish is two and a half hours of boiling. The aim here was flesh dry and firm enough to hold its shape through a second boil in vinegar, not delicate poached salmon. Modern practice poaches salmon to roughly 125-130F internal and calls it done.
- Vessels and termsA "porcelain kettle" is enamelled cast iron or steel; the point is that bare iron or copper reacts with vinegar and darkens both metal and fish. Blades of mace are the dried outer casing of nutmeg, sold whole; whole mustard means mustard seed, not prepared mustard.
- If you want pickled salmonUse a current, tested recipe for refrigerator-pickled fish with stated acid proportions and a stated refrigerated shelf life.
Pickled salmon belonged to the era when a large fish arrived whole and had to be dealt with in one afternoon. Along the Atlantic seaboard and in Britain, boiling salmon and then covering it with spiced vinegar was standard household economy well before commercial canning; the sealed glass jar here is often said to be a refinement on the older practice of keeping the fish in a crock under vinegar in the cellar. The appeal was a cold, sharp, ready-made fish course that could be lifted from a jar on a day when no one wanted to light the range. The Dutch and Jewish traditions of soused and pickled fish, which travelled to America and gave rise to pickled herring on the delicatessen counter, are generally traced to the same preserving logic. What the recipe records, alongside its confident promise of a year's keeping, is a household working entirely by eye and smell.