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Salmon, Fricandeau of
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 or 8 persons. -3 lbs. of middle of salmon, lardoons cut fine, 2 onions, 2 carrots, 2 bay-leaves, some thyme, SALMON, FRIED. whole pepper, grated nutmeg and salt, a pint of stock. AVERAGE COST, 5s.
Having scaled, washed and dried the fish, lard it finely, and put it into a stewpan with the vegetables cut fine, and the rest of the ingredients, and allow it to simmer very gently for 2 hours. Strain the sauce, skim off the fat, reduce it to a glaze, and with it glaze the fricandeau.
FRICANDEAU OF SALMON.
Serve with the glaze made again into sauce with a little stock, or what is better, with a purée of green peas.
TIME.-2¼ hours.
SEASONABLE from April to August.
Salmon, Fried. (Jewish Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.- 2 lbs. of salmon, a small flask of olive oil.
AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Pour the oil into a small deep pan over a clear fire, and when it ceases to bubble, put in the salmon well cleaned, and cut in two cutlets if too thick, and fry till thoroughly cooked through. It should only be a pale brown, and when it becomes so, raise the pan a little from the fire.
When thoroughly done, drain and leave it to get cold, when serve or a fancy paper, garnished with parsley and cut-lemon.
TIME.-About hour to fry the fish.
SEASONABLE from April to August.
A Victorian treatment of salmon borrowed from butchery: the fish is larded like a veal fricandeau, braised in an aromatic stock, then glazed with its own reduced cooking liquor. The braising time given is the single thing that most needs rethinking.
- Two hours will destroy the fishA 3 lb centre cut of salmon braised at a bare simmer is done in roughly 25-35 minutes, when the thickest part is just set through. The two-hour instruction looks like a carry-over from the veal fricandeau this dish imitates; applied to salmon it yields dry, flaking curd.
- LardingLardoons are matchsticks of firm pork back fat threaded through the flesh with a larding needle. Neither the fat nor the needle is common now; strips of firm fatty bacon inserted with a thin boning knife give the same self-basting effect, or the step can simply be omitted since farmed salmon is already fatty.
- Reducing to a glazeStrained, skimmed and boiled down, a pint of stock gives only a few spoonfuls of syrupy glaze. Watch it closely at the end -- fish stock catches and turns bitter fast once it thickens.
- The stockUse a light fish or vegetable stock, not beef. The recipe simply says 'stock'; a good bought fish stock or a quick simmer of the salmon's own trimmings works.
- StewpanA lidded pan for stewing; a wide, fairly shallow pan works best here. The fish should sit in one layer with the liquid coming part way up, not be submerged.
- The pea puréeThe suggested accompaniment is worth taking seriously: fresh peas cooked with a little butter and mint, then blitzed and sieved. It carries the sweetness that the reduced glaze concentrates.
- For the fried versionOlive oil deep enough to come up the sides of thick cutlets, heated until it stops bubbling, which indicates the surface moisture has cooked off. The dish is meant to be served cold, as the recipe directs, in the Anglo-Jewish manner, so do not carry it to the table hot.
- Yield and costSix to eight as written for the fricandeau, four or five for the fried salmon. The shilling prices are of historical interest only.
The fricandeau is properly a cut of veal, larded and braised until it can be cut with a spoon, then glazed with its own reduced liquor -- one of the set pieces of eighteenth and nineteenth century French cookery. Applying the method to a fish was a piece of kitchen ambition typical of the grand Victorian repertoire, where a dish gained status by being treated as though it were something more expensive. Salmon was still a seasonal river fish in Britain when these books were compiled, hence the April-to-August note; refrigerated transport and later farming turned it into a year-round staple. The fried salmon that follows is labelled a Jewish recipe, and it is: cold fried fish in olive oil, eaten the following day, is a Sabbath dish brought to England by Sephardi households from the seventeenth century onward, and it is generally credited as one of the ancestors of English fried fish.