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Salmon and Caper Sauce
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-2 slices of salmon, 3 oz. of butter, 1/2 teaspoonful of chopped parsley, 1 shalot; salt, pepper and grated nutmeg to taste; caper sauce. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Lay the salmon in a baking-dish, place pieces of butter over it, and add the other ingredients, rubbing a little of the seasoning into the fish; baste it frequently; when done, take it out and drain for a minute or two; lay it in a dish, pour caper sauce over it, and serve. Salmon dressed in this way, with tomato sauce, is very delicious.
TIME.-About hour.
SEASONABLE from April to August.
A plain baked salmon that depends entirely on the sauce poured over it at the end. The one thing to change is the cooking time, which belongs to an era of much thicker cuts and much lower expectations of moistness.
- The time is the problemThe original reads "About hour," with the fraction dropped in the printing; whatever it was, it will render a modern salmon steak dry and chalky. Thick cut steaks of 1 to 1.5 inches want 12-18 minutes, taken out at 125-130F at the centre; the flesh should still look faintly translucent along the bone.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a coal range offered none to set, and the recipe leaves the heat to the cook. 350F is a fair reading for a plain bake, and 400F suits a modern thick steak better.
- "2 slices of salmon"Slices here means cross-cut steaks through the bone, not fillets, and Victorian ones were cut generously from a large fish. Two steaks of 10-12 oz each will not feed six; for six people reckon on about 2.5 to 3 lb of salmon, or six 6-oz portions.
- ShalotA single shallot, finely chopped. A modern banana shallot is large enough to be worth halving unless you want it forward in the dish.
- Caper sauceBeeton's caper sauce is a white roux sauce, usually made with melted butter or fish stock, into which capers and a little of their vinegar are stirred at the end. Add the capers off the heat so the vinegar does not thin or split the sauce, and do not salt until after they are in.
- BastingBaste with the butter in the dish every few minutes. With the shorter cooking time above you will get one or two chances, which is enough; the butter and juices in the dish are worth spooning over the fish as it rests rather than discarding.
- Seasonable April to AugustThis is the old wild Atlantic salmon season. Farmed salmon is available year round and is fattier, which is on your side here, since it tolerates the butter and the oven better than lean wild fish.
- NutmegGrated nutmeg on fish reads oddly now but was standard Victorian seasoning. A rasp or two is plenty; more will fight the capers.
Caper sauce was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English table, most familiarly served with boiled mutton but applied freely to fish, where the vinegar cut the richness of butter-baked salmon. The capers themselves, pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, came from the Mediterranean and were among the shelf-stable imported goods that a middle-class British larder was expected to keep. Beeton's April-to-August note reflects the wild Atlantic salmon runs of British rivers; the average cost of 3s. 6d. she quotes was still a substantial sum for a household dinner. The recipe's construction, a plainly cooked protein finished with a named sauce, is characteristic of the book's method throughout: learn a handful of sauces and the same piece of fish becomes several dinners, which is exactly the point of the closing suggestion about tomato sauce.