Pickled Salmon
Clean a fine salmon cut into large pieces and boil in salted water in the usual way. Drain, wrap in a dry cloth and set in a cold place to be used next day. For the pickle: To one quart of the water in which the salmon was boiled allow two quarts of the best vinegar; one ounce of whole black pepper; one grated nutmeg and a dozen blades of mace. Boil in a kettle closely covered to prevent evaporation of the flavor. When quite cold pour over the salmon; then pour in the top one tablespoon of sweet oil to preserve it longer. Cover closely and place in a dry cool place. This pickle will keep many months.
This is a nineteenth-century keeping recipe, and the keeping is the part that no longer stands up. The notes below explain the archaic terms and then why the storage instruction puts this dish out of reach.
- Unrefrigerated storage is the fatal flawCooked fish held in a "dry cool place" for "many months" is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum growth: a low-oxygen environment, a moist high-protein food, and cellar temperatures well above refrigeration. Nothing in the method sterilises the jar or the fish after the pickle cools.
- The oil seal makes it worse, not betterThe tablespoon of "sweet oil" floated on top was meant to exclude air, and it does exactly that. Sealing a room-temperature fish preserve under oil creates the anaerobic conditions botulinum toxin requires, and the toxin is odourless and tasteless.
- The acidity is unmeasuredTwo quarts of vinegar to one quart of fish cooking water sounds sharp, but the salmon itself is a large, low-acid mass that the pickle only penetrates slowly. Without a measured final pH at or below 4.6 throughout the fish, there is no acid barrier to rely on, and the strength of "the best vinegar" then was variable rather than the 5 percent product a modern tested recipe assumes.
- Cold pickle on cold fishThe pickle is boiled, then cooled completely before it touches the salmon, so no step ever brings the packed jar to a temperature that would kill spores or surface bacteria carried in from the cloth and the overnight rest.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece, and blade size varies, so a dozen is a loose measure rather than a fixed one. It is still sold whole in spice shops, though ground mace is more common.
- Sweet oilPeriod shorthand for mild olive oil. It has no preservative function beyond excluding air.
- "Boil in the usual way""Boil in salted water in the usual way" -- the recipe specifies plain salted water and gives no further detail. Salmon cooked at a hard boil in large pieces splits and weeps albumen; a bare simmer is the practical reading.
- If you want pickled salmonUse a current tested recipe for refrigerated soused or pickled fish, eaten within days, or a properly specified pressure-canned procedure. Do not adapt the storage directions above.
Pickling was one of the few ways an inland household could meet salmon at all before reliable refrigerated rail and canning, and vinegar-and-spice preserves of boiled fish appear in English and Scottish cookery from at least the seventeenth century — the related "soused" and "caveached" fish, the latter better attested from the eighteenth century, use the same logic of cooking first, then flooding with spiced vinegar. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, commercially canned Pacific salmon was cheap and widely available, so a recipe like this one already read as a thrifty way to stretch a whole fresh fish rather than a necessity; it assumes a cool cellar and a household that put food by in quantity, which is precisely the assumption a modern kitchen cannot honour.