“They started again the next morning, and instead of leaving the river for the Hudson Bay post, which stood farther back into the wilderness, they held on down-stream, though they afterward regretted this when their provisions once more grew scanty. There was now sharp frost at nights; fangs of ice stretched out behind the boulders and crackling sheets of it gathered in the slacker eddies along the bank. What mattered more was that the portages were frequent, and carrying the canoe over rock coated with frozen spray became dangerous as well as difficult, and Nasmyth working on short rations began to feel the strain. It was only since he had entered that inhospitable region that he had ever been compelled to go without his dinner; and now breakfast and supper were sternly curtailed. When they were stopped for two days by a blinding snowstorm he grew anxious, and his uneasiness had increased when some time afterward they made their evening meal of a single flapjack each. He could readily have eaten a dozen of the thin, flat cakes. The duck they had shot every now and then since crossing the divide had gone; they had not seen a trout since the cold set in; and there did not appear to be any salmon in the river.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Take a salmon, draw it, scotch the back, and boil it whole in a stew-pan with white-wine, (or in pieces) put to it also some whole cloves, large mace, slic't ginger, a bay-leaf or two, a bundle of sweet herbs well and hard bound up, some whole pepper, salt, some butter, and vinegar, and an orange in halves; stew all together, and being well stewed, dish them in a clean scowred dish with carved sippets, lay on the spices and slic't lemon, and run it over with beaten butter, and some of the gravy it was stewed in; garnish the dish with some fine searsed manchet or searsed ginger.
Sources: The passage is from Harold Bindloss, The Long Portage, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — moss cloth, ship stamp.