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Broiled Kippered Salmon
Cut the salmon into strips, and wrap each one separately in buttered paper; make a gridiron hot and grease it well, lay the pieces of fish on it, and broil them over a clear fire, turning them now and then. When broiled, remove the paper, place the pieces of fish on a very hot dish, and serve at once.
A three-line method that depends entirely on equipment: an open grate over live coals, and paper as the buffer between fish and iron. Both parts translate, but the paper is the hinge.
- Buttered paperParchment, generously buttered, not wax paper and not foil. The parcel keeps the cured flesh from sticking and welding to the bars, and it steams the strips just enough that they stay moist. Fold the ends closed rather than leaving them open.
- Gridiron equals grill grateA gridiron sat directly over coals. A charcoal grill or a well-heated ridged stovetop grill pan does the same work. Heat the metal fully before the fish touches it, then oil it — oiling a cold grate only produces gum.
- "A clear fire"Coals burned down past the flame stage, glowing and free of smoke — roughly a medium-hot bed you can hold a hand over for three or four seconds. Flames would scorch the paper before the fish was warmed through.
- Kippered salmon is already curedIn this period the term generally meant salmon split, brined and smoked, a firmer and saltier product than the delicate cold-smoked lox sold today; breakfast kippers, by contrast, are herring. Buy lox instead and it will fall apart and turn to salt paste over fire.
- TimingCut strips roughly an inch wide and give them four to six minutes total, turning two or three times. The fish is cured, so the object is heating and light browning, not cooking it through from raw. Longer and it dries into strings.
- SaltNo seasoning is called for because none is needed — the cure supplies it. If the salmon is strongly kippered, a soak in cold water or milk for fifteen minutes before wrapping tames it.
- ServingThe instruction to use a very hot dish and serve at once is not a flourish; smoked salmon fat congeals quickly. Lemon and brown bread are common accompaniments. Figure 4 to 6 oz per person as a breakfast or supper dish.
Kippered salmon was a familiar breakfast and supper dish in late-nineteenth-century hotel dining, and smoked fish was one of the few fish that traveled reliably before dependable refrigeration. "Kipper" is generally traced to a Middle English word for the spawning male salmon, and came to name the split-brine-and-smoke treatment applied to it; the herring kipper of the English breakfast table is generally said to have taken over both the method and the name. Broiling a cured fish in buttered paper over coals was a common answer to anything that might stick or dry.