Home › Cookery › Boiled Salmon
Boiled Salmon
After the fish has been cleaned and washed, dry it and sew it up in a cloth; lay it in a fish-kettle, cover with warm water, and simmer until done and tender. Meanwhile have ready in a saucepan one pint cream, two tablespoonfuls fresh butter, salt, pepper, minced parsley, and thyme; let it boil up once, not too quickly. Take the fish from the kettle, carefully unwrap it, lay it for a moment on a folded napkin to dry. Have ready a hot dish, lay the fish on it carefully, without breaking it, pour over the cream. Slice some hard-boiled eggs, and lay over the fish alternately with sliced lemon. Border the edges of the dish with curled parsley.--Mrs. S.T.
A whole poached salmon with a cream sauce, from a period when fish was cooked by feel rather than by thermometer. The recipe's silences are about timing and doneness, which is where modern practice diverges most.
- The hinge: never let it boil"Simmer" here means water barely trembling, around 160-175F. A rolling boil tears the skin, forces albumin out in white curds, and leaves the flesh dry at the shoulder before the middle is warm.
- TimingThe original gives none. For a whole fish, reckon roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point; 125-130F at the spine gives moist flesh and 140F flesh that is fully set, though the standard food-safety figure for fish is 145F.
- The clothSewing the fish in muslin or cheesecloth is not decorative -- it is a practical way to lift a poached whole salmon out intact. Use unbleached cotton, leave long tails at each end as handles, and skip the sewing if you simply wrap and tie.
- Fish-kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lift-out trivet. A deep roasting pan works: line it with a cloth sling and cover with foil, or curve the fish in a wide Dutch oven.
- Cover with warm waterStarting warm rather than cold shortens the come-up time without shocking the skin. Salt the water generously and add a splash of vinegar or wine and a bay leaf if you want a proper court-bouillon; the original leaves the poaching liquid plain.
- One pint creamTwo cups of heavy cream, boiled up once and no more -- it should coat, not reduce to a glaze. Two tablespoons butter finishes it. Fresh thyme leaves, not the whole sprig.
- YieldA 4-5 lb dressed salmon serves eight to ten as a main course.
Boiled salmon with egg sauce was a fixed point of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, and this Virginia version keeps the eggs while replacing the usual flour-thickened sauce with straight cream. Salmon is not a Virginia fish, and its appearance in a Southern household book reflects the second half of the century, when ice-packed rail shipment and then canned Pacific salmon made it available far from the rivers where it ran. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named housekeepers across Virginia and neighbouring states, and published in Louisville, which is why the recipe ends with initials rather than a byline; the collection reads as a record of what a particular circle of households actually cooked. The elaborate garnish -- alternating egg and lemon slices, a border of curled parsley -- belongs to the era's taste for the composed centerpiece, arranged on the dish rather than sauced at table.