Salmon Cutlets
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-2 lbs. of salmon, butter, pepper and salt, some good wellflavoured sauce. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d. Cut the slices 1 inch thick, and season them with pepper and salt; butter a sheet of white paper, lay each slice on a separate piece, with their ends twisted; broil gently over a clear fire, and serve with anchovy, caper, or any other sauce. When higher seasoning is required, add a few chopped herbs and a little spice.
TIME.-5 to 10 minutes.
A plain grilled salmon steak, cooked in a buttered paper wrapper that keeps the fish moist and stops it sticking to the bars. The only technical demand is heat control.
- "Cutlets" means steaksA cutlet here is a cross-section steak cut through the bone, not a boneless fillet or a breaded patty. Two pounds cut an inch thick gives roughly six steaks of 5-6 oz.
- The paper is the methodButtering a sheet of paper and twisting the ends makes a loose parcel — an early form of the same idea as en papillote. Use parchment, not greaseproof or waxed paper, and butter it generously; the paper should scorch at the edges but not flame.
- "Broil over a clear fire"This means a fire burned down past smoke and flame to steady glowing coals, on a coal range or over embers. Under a modern overhead broiler or on a gas grill at a moderate heat — the recipe says "broil gently" — the timing holds; turn the parcels once.
- Time and donenessFive to ten minutes total is right for an inch-thick steak. Take it off when the centre reaches about 125-130F and the flesh still looks faintly translucent at the bone — farmed salmon in particular dries out fast past that point.
- "Some good well-flavoured sauce"Beeton assumes a sauce is already in the kitchen. Anchovy sauce is a butter or velouté sauce sharpened with anchovy essence; caper sauce is the same base with capers and a little vinegar. Hollandaise or a plain anchovy butter serve the same purpose.
- The herbs and spiceThe optional "chopped herbs and a little spice" would most likely go on with the salt and pepper, inside the paper. Parsley or fennel, and a scrape of mace or nutmeg, are period-appropriate.
- Cost3s. 6d. for six was not a cheap dish.
Salmon was one of the great British river fish, and until the railways it was eaten close to where it was caught — plentiful and cheap in Scotland and on the Severn, expensive and prized in London. By the time Mrs Beeton's household books were circulating in the second half of the nineteenth century, ice and fast trains had made fresh salmon a reliable town commodity, which is why it appears so often in her fish chapters, boiled whole, potted, curried, or cut into cutlets like these. The paper wrapper is a much older trick than the recipe: cooking delicate flesh in oiled or buttered paper over coals appears in English and French cookery well before 1800, and the twisted ends here are simply a way of sealing a parcel without string. The insistence on "a clear fire" is the detail that dates the page — a cook working at a coal range or over embers had to judge her heat by eye, and smoke or flame would have tainted the fish through the paper.