Broiled Salmon
Cut slices one and one-half inch thick and season with salt and pepper; lay each slice on a buttered piece of white paper, envelop it and twist the ends of the paper. Broil over a clear fire, gently, and serve with anchovy or caper sauce. A few chopped herbs and a little spice may be used if higher seasoning is desired. Or, cut slices one or one and one-half inch thick, dry in a cloth, salt, pepper and dredge them with flour and broil on a gridiron rubbed with suet.
Two methods for the same cut: one wrapped in buttered paper, one dredged and laid bare on the bars. Both assume a thick centre-cut steak and a fire you can control.
- The paper parcelThis is en papillote by another name — plain white kitchen paper, buttered, twisted at both ends like a cracker. Use parchment rather than any modern printed or coated paper, and set it well away from open flame so the paper scorches rather than ignites.
- A clear fireMeans embers with no smoke and no leaping flame — coals burned down to grey ash. Under a gas or electric broiler, use medium heat with the rack about 4 inches from the element, not the highest setting.
- Steak thickness and timingAn inch and a half is a substantial steak. Reckon roughly 5 to 6 minutes a side over coals, or until the flesh at the bone flakes but still looks moist; salmon cooked to opacity throughout is dry salmon. The paper method runs a little slower because the fish is effectively steaming in its own butter.
- Suet on the gridironBeef suet was rubbed over hot bars to stop sticking and to add fat where the fish had little contact. Any hard fat or high-smoke-point oil does the same job; the bars must be hot before the fish touches them.
- Dredging with flourThe flour is there to form a dry crust that will not weld to the metal. Dry the steak thoroughly first, as the recipe says, or the flour turns to paste.
- Anchovy and caper sauceBoth were usually served as butter sauces in this period: melted butter or a thin white sauce sharpened with anchovy essence, or with capers and a little of their vinegar. Modern anchovy paste is generally stronger than the older bottled essences, so start sparingly — about half a teaspoon per half cup of sauce — and taste.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a steak of this thickness will serve one generously, or two if the rest of the meal is substantial. Salmon 'slices' of this kind were cut crosswise from the fish, bone in.
Broiled salmon steaks appear often in nineteenth-century American and British cookbooks, and the two methods here mark a real division in technique: the paper case, borrowed from French practice, protects a fatty fish from the drying heat of coals and keeps the butter and juices with the flesh, while the floured gridiron method gives the browned crust that the paper cannot. Anchovy sauce as an accompaniment to salmon goes back at least to the eighteenth-century English kitchen, where the salt and umami of preserved anchovy were used to point up the richness of oily fish — the same logic that puts Worcestershire on a steak. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) was published by the pattern company as part of its broad household library, and its fish chapter gives directions for cutting steaks from a whole salmon.