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Boiled Salmon with Oyster Sauce
Put two pounds of very fresh salmon in a fishkettle, completely cover it with cold water, season with a handful of salt, add one medium-sized onion, one-half wine-glassful of white wine vinegar, eight or ten whole peppers, two cloves and two parsley roots. Place the kettle over a brisk fire, and five minutes after coming to the boil the salmon will be sufficiently cooked. Remove the fish from the kettle, drain it well, dress it on a hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with sprigs of parsley all round the salmon, and serve with one pint of hot oyster sauce in a sauce-boat. The necessary time to cook the above perfectly, from beginning to end, will be about thirty-five minutes. Colbert sauce and cold boiled potatoes, cut into quarters, may be substituted for the oyster sauce and parsley.
Boiled Slices of Salmon with Piquant Sauce Cut five slices of salmon, each three-fourths of an inch thick, from the middle of the fish, wash and dry them well, and put them in a saucepan of hot fish broth mixed up with a small quantity of wine. When boiling move the pan to the side of the fire, place the lid on, and let the contents simmer gently for ten or twelve minutes. When cooked, remove the slices of salmon carefully, wipe them on a cloth, and arrange them in an upright position on a folded napkin on a hot dish; place a group of boiled potatoes at each side, a bunch of parsley at each end, and serve with a sauceboatful of piquant sauce.
Two related methods for poached salmon, written for a kitchen with a fish kettle and a coal range. The conversions are simple; the one thing that needs rethinking is the boil.
- Oyster sauce means something else hereThis is the 19th-century English sauce: a white sauce or fish velouté finished with cream, the strained oyster liquor, and shucked oysters warmed through at the end. It has nothing to do with bottled Chinese oyster sauce. Add the oysters off the heat and give them a minute or two at most, or they tighten into erasers.
- Do not actually boil it"Place the kettle over a brisk fire" and five minutes at a rolling boil will squeeze albumen out of the flesh in white curds. Bring the court-bouillon to a bare simmer, slide the fish in, and hold the water at 170-180F until the thickest part reads 120-125F, roughly 8-10 minutes for a two-pound piece.
- Half a wine-glassfulA wine-glass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though period sources vary, so roughly 1 fl oz of white wine vinegar. It is there to firm the flesh and season the poaching liquid rather than to be tasted in the finished dish.
- Parsley rootsHamburg parsley root, still common in Central European markets and occasionally at farm stands. A small parsnip and a few parsley stalks stand in acceptably.
- No fish kettleAny pan deep enough to cover the fish works; a roasting pan across two burners will take a whole side. The point of the kettle was the perforated rack, so improvise one with a folded strip of cheesecloth or a cake rack to lift the fish out intact.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin under the fish absorbs the water that keeps seeping out after draining, so the sauce is not thinned on the plate. Worth doing; the sauce is in any case sent separately in a boat.
- Colbert sauceSoftened butter worked with meat glaze, lemon, chopped tarragon and parsley -- a compound butter that melts over the hot fish, not a poured sauce. It presumes a jar of reduced brown stock in the larder.
- The second methodThree-quarter-inch steaks, ten to twelve minutes in barely-simmering fish broth, is again generous by current standards; six to eight minutes will do, tested with a knife tip at the bone.
- YieldTwo pounds of salmon serves three as a main course, four as a fish course in a longer menu. The five steaks serve five.
Boiled salmon with oyster sauce was one of the fixed points of the British and Anglo-American dinner table through the whole of the 19th century -- oyster sauce is a staple of Eliza Acton and Mrs. Beeton, though most famously served there with boiled cod -- and Oscar Tschirky is here recording a classic rather than inventing one. The pairing made sense when oysters were cheap bulk protein rather than a luxury: New York harbor beds supplied the city by the cartload, and oyster liquor was the natural way to give a white sauce depth without meat stock. What dates the recipe is not the sauce but the cooking. Salmon was cooked until it flaked from the bone, and the folded napkin, the ringed parsley and the sauce sent separately in a boat all belong to the general conventions of formal service. Oscar's insistence on "very fresh" salmon is worth noting too, and the poaching liquid, with its vinegar and whole spices, was designed as much to firm and season an already-travelled fish as to flavor it.