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Boiled Salmon
Clean and boil as directed in Ways of Cooking Fish.
Place on a hot platter, remove skin, and garnish with slices of lemon and parsley. Serve with Egg Sauce I or II, or Hollandaise Sauce.
The instruction that matters is hidden in the cross-reference: "boil" here means barely simmering in salted, acidulated water, not a rolling boil. Salmon cooked at a true boil in the modern sense will shred, curl and weep white albumen.
- What "boiled" meantNineteenth-century "boiled" fish generally meant cooking in salted, frequently acidulated water held below a rolling boil; the cross-referenced Ways of Cooking Fish directions should be checked for the exact wording. In modern terms, hold the water at about 170-180F -- the surface should shiver, not bubble.
- TimingNo time is given in this entry; any timing sits in the cross-referenced general directions. Reckon 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point for a piece, or roughly 6-8 minutes per pound for a whole fish, starting the count once the water returns to a simmer.
- DonenessOlder directions generally cooked fish until it flaked readily, which by current taste is on the well-done side. Many cooks now pull salmon at about 125-130F at the centre for a moist, just-set fish; the residual heat on a hot platter will carry it further.
- Wrapping the fishWhole fish were tied in cheesecloth or laid on a rack in a fish kettle so they could be lifted out intact. Without one, use a wide pan, a folded cloth sling or a length of foil under the fish; a poached side of salmon will not survive a spatula.
- Skin while hotRemove the skin the moment the fish comes out of the water, as directed. Once it cools the skin grips the flesh and takes the top layer with it.
- Egg Sauce I or IIThese are elsewhere in the book: a plain white sauce (butter, flour, milk or part fish stock) with chopped or sliced hard-boiled egg folded in. Nothing exotic is required, but the sauce wants to be thin enough to pour.
- YieldAllow about 1/3 to 1/2 lb of dressed salmon per person, closer to 3/4 lb per person for a whole fish with head and bones.
Boiled salmon with egg sauce, new potatoes and green peas was a familiar New England Fourth of July dinner in the nineteenth century, timed to the Kennebec and Penobscot salmon runs and the first peas of the season; the pairing is repeated in cookbook after cookbook of the period. The terseness of the entry is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School book, which organised itself around master methods: the reader was expected to have learned poaching once, under Ways of Cooking Fish, and then apply it to whatever came to hand. Wild Atlantic salmon of that abundance is much depleted in those rivers, where the fish is now protected, and the fish on a modern platter will almost certainly be farmed or Pacific: same method, a different animal.