Boiled Salmon
Salmon requires from ten to twenty minutes for each pound in boiling. Hollandaise sauce is generally served with it.
Two sentences of instruction, one of which modern practice has thrown out entirely. Take the timing as a historical curiosity and cook the fish by temperature instead.
- The timing is the problemTen to twenty minutes per pound will give you dry, chalky, curd-flecked salmon. A whole side or fish poached at a bare simmer (about 170-180F, never a rolling boil) wants roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness, and it is done at 120-125F at the thickest part.
- "Boiled" never meant boiling"Boiled" often meant something gentler -- Many period books used "boiled fish" for what we would call poaching, and directed the water to be kept just below a boil, though the usage is not consistent from book to book. Hard boiling tears the flakes apart and drives out albumin, which appears as the white curd on the surface. Keep the liquid at a shiver.
- The missing court-bouillonThe recipe says nothing about the cooking liquid. The usual period fish liquor was salted water with a splash of vinegar or lemon, a sliced onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. Plain water gives plain fish.
- VesselA fish kettle with a perforated lift-out plate was the purpose-made tool for this and was widely sold in well-equipped kitchens of the period. A deep roasting pan works, with the fish wrapped in cheesecloth or laid on a folded strip of cloth so you can lift it out in one piece.
- HollandaiseServe it warm, not hot, and hold it off direct heat; above roughly 160F the emulsion breaks. About 1/2 cup sauce serves four.
- YieldFigure 6-8 oz of raw fish per person, so a 3 lb boneless piece serves six to eight.
- Serving temperatureCold boiled salmon with a mayonnaise-style sauce was also a common treatment in this period, and holds better on a buffet.
Boiled salmon with a rich egg-and-butter sauce was a standard formal fish course of the late nineteenth-century English and American table, and the brevity here suggests how thoroughly assumed it was: the book gives a time and a sauce and little else. Salmon was also, around the time this book was printed, in the middle of a transformation. Atlantic runs in New England rivers had largely collapsed, while Pacific canneries on the Columbia and in Alaska were shipping salmon across the continent in tins, which is why so many books of the era carry both a grand poached whole fish and a shelf of canned-salmon croquettes. Hollandaise, whose name is traditionally -- though not verifiably -- linked to Dutch butter, had by this date become a near-automatic partner to poached fish in English-language cookbooks, to the point that recipes like this one no longer bother to explain it.