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Boiled Salmon
Wash and clean the fish; sew it in a cheesecloth bag, leaving room for fish to swell. Place in kettle; cover with boiling salted water, allowing one tablespoon of salt to each quart of water. Boil ten minutes and place in cooker for an hour and a half. Serve fish with rings of lemon and tomato sauce.
This belongs to the fireless-cookery chapter, which assumes equipment almost no one owns now. The method translates to a covered pot and a very low burner, or a thermal cooker, but the timing needs rethinking entirely.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box, often packed with hay, felt or asbestos, into which a pot of already-boiling food was sealed to finish on retained heat. The nearest modern equivalents are a vacuum thermal cooker or a heavy pot wrapped in towels; a slow cooker on low is a rough substitute but supplies heat rather than merely holding it.
- The timing is the problemCooks now usually take salmon off at about 125-130F in the thickest part (a doneness preference, not a safety figure; official guidance for fish is 145F), and for a whole fish covered in near-boiling water that is roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness. An hour and a half of hot-holding gives firm, dry, chalky flesh that flakes into curds. Ten minutes at a bare simmer plus 15-20 minutes off the heat, covered, is the whole job for a piece of a few pounds.
- Keep the water hot, not merely warmIf you improvise the insulation, use a large volume of water in a heavy pot and check that it is still steaming hot at the end. A weakly insulated pot sitting for 90 minutes can drift down into the range where bacteria multiply, and the fish will have been cooked but then held badly.
- The cheesecloth bagNot decoration: it is the practical way to lift a whole poached fish out intact, as a fish kettle's perforated rack was. Leave the ends long as handles. A double thickness of cheesecloth, or a rack lined with cloth, does the same for fillets and steaks.
- The saltOne tablespoon per quart is about 2 percent salinity, on the strong side by modern taste but correct for fish poached in plain water. A court bouillon of the same water with a sliced onion, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a splash of white wine or vinegar costs nothing extra.
- Never a hard boilDespite the title, salmon should go into water at a bare shiver and stay there. A rolling boil bursts the skin, tears the flakes apart and pushes white albumin out onto the surface.
- Tomato sauce with salmonPeriod cookbooks pair boiled salmon with tomato, egg or caper sauce interchangeably. If tomato sauce sounds odd, hollandaise, a green herb mayonnaise or plain melted butter with lemon all suit better and are equally of the era.
- YieldFigure 8 oz of whole fish per person, so a 4 lb salmon serves six to eight. Serve hot with the lemon rings, or chill it in the cooking liquid and serve cold.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American kitchens from roughly 1905 into the 1920s, and books of the period routinely gave a chapter to it: food was brought to a boil on the range, then sealed in an insulated box to finish on its own stored heat, saving coal or gas and freeing the cook from tending a fire in a hot kitchen. Whole boiled salmon was a natural candidate, since Victorian and Edwardian tables treated a cloth-wrapped poached fish garnished with lemon as a set-piece dish, plain enough to survive any cooking method and handsome enough for company. The instruction to sew the fish into a bag "leaving room for fish to swell" is inherited straight from nineteenth-century fish cookery, long before anyone thought about insulated boxes, and it remains the most practical part of the recipe. What the chapter reveals is a period in which fuel economy, not flavor, drove technique -- an interest that faded as gas and electric ranges made a controlled low simmer trivially easy.