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Picked Salmon
Soak the salmon twenty-four hours, changing the water. Put it in boiling water, with a little vinegar. When done and cold, boil your vinegar with spice and pour on the fish.--Mrs. A. P.
A barrel-era recipe for salt salmon, written for cooks who kept a keg of it in the pantry and knew the rest by heart. Almost every quantity is left to judgment, so the notes below fill in what the original assumes.
- The fish is salt salmon, not freshThe twenty-four-hour soak with changes of water only makes sense for hard-salted fish sold in barrels or slabs. Fresh salmon needs no soaking at all, and soaking it would ruin the texture. If you are working from fresh fillets, this recipe is not the one to follow.
- Soaking and the water changesChange the water several times over the course of the day, keeping the fish cold throughout. Taste a scrap of the poaching liquid partway through: salt salmon varies enormously in cure strength, so some pieces may be ready well before the full twenty-four hours while others are still fierce at the end of it.
- "When done"The fish goes into water already at a boil, which should then be dropped to a bare shiver. A thick piece takes roughly 8 to 12 minutes at a gentle simmer; it is done when the flesh separates into flakes at the thickest point. Held at a rolling boil it will fall apart and go dry.
- The vinegarHousehold vinegar of this period was generally cider or wine vinegar rather than modern distilled, and its strength was not standardised. Cider vinegar is the closer match in flavour. Read the "little vinegar" in the poaching water as a splash, a tablespoon or two per quart, which helps firm the flesh.
- SpiceFor pickled fish of this period that means whole spices in the pickling vinegar: black peppercorns, allspice, a blade of mace, a few cloves, bay leaf, sometimes a sliced onion. Boil them in the vinegar for five minutes or so before it goes over the fish.
- Hot vinegar on cold fishThe instruction is specific and worth respecting: the fish must be quite cold and drained before the boiling pickle goes on, or it will keep cooking and shred. Pouring the spiced vinegar on cold instead gives a firmer result, though it departs from what is written here.
- Keeping itThis was a larder preparation in an age without refrigeration, and the vinegar was the whole point. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle: keep it covered and cold, and eat it within four or five days. It is not shelf-stable, and it should not be sealed in jars and stored at room temperature.
- ServingServe it cold, lifted out of the pickle, with brown bread and butter or as part of a cold supper table. A pound of soaked fish makes four modest servings.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by housewives in Virginia and neighbouring states, which is why so many entries end with a set of initials rather than a name; "Mrs. A. P." is writing to other women who already know what salt salmon looks like and how long a fish takes to poach. Salmon was not a Virginia fish in any quantity, and this recipe reflects the coastal trade in barrelled salt salmon, which travelled inland cheaply and kept well. Pickling boiled fish in spiced vinegar is one of the oldest preserving methods in the European kitchen, related to the British "soused" mackerel and herring and, more distantly, to the Iberian escabeche; the vinegar both flavours the fish and slows spoilage. In a household with a cellar but no ice, such a preparation would have made sense for cold suppers and for stretching an expensive imported ingredient.