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Broiled Salmon
Cut some slices of salmon from the tail, place them in a deep dish, cover with chopped parsley, laurel leaves and mixed herbs, season with salt and pepper, pour over some olive oil, and leave to soak for an hour. Broil the slices of fish on a gridiron, basting them occasionally with some of the marinade. When nicely browned and cooked, place the salmon on a hot dish, pour some white caper sauce over and serve.
A straightforward marinated grill from Oscar Tschirky's kitchen, written for cooks who already knew how a gridiron behaved. A few conventions need translating.
- Cut from the tailTail-end slices are leaner and more uniform than steaks cut near the head, so they cook evenly over direct heat. Steaks about 1 inch thick, 6-8 oz each, are the modern equivalent; a center-cut fillet portion works as well.
- Laurel leavesBay leaves. Two or three in an hour-long oil marinade is plenty; more turns the fish medicinal. "Mixed herbs" was a loose term and could cover thyme, parsley and bay, sometimes with a little marjoram, but the recipe leaves the choice open.
- The marinade is oil, not acidThere is no lemon or vinegar here. An hour in acid would begin to firm and whiten the surface of the flesh; the oil simply carries the herb flavor and keeps the fish from welding to the bars.
- Gridiron equals grill grateA gridiron was a set of iron bars set over coals, or a ridged plate over the range. Use a hot grill or a heavy ridged pan, thoroughly preheated and oiled, so the fish releases cleanly.
- Doneness"Nicely browned and cooked" almost certainly implied a fish cooked through by modern standards. Modern practice for salmon stops at 125-130F in the center, roughly 4-5 minutes a side for a 1-inch steak, which leaves the middle just translucent and far moister.
- Basting with the marinadeHerb-flecked oil dripping onto coals will flare. Brush lightly rather than pouring, and keep a cooler zone of the grill open to move the fish to if flames come up.
- White caper sauceMost likely a velouté or thin béchamel finished with drained capers and a little of their vinegar, sometimes mounted with butter. The recipe gives no method for it; about 1 cup sauce serves four.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity, only "some slices"; four to six portions is a reasonable assumption. It is a main course, and boiled potatoes and cucumber are the usual accompaniments for salmon of this kind.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef at the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 Cook Book collected the kitchen's working repertoire, and it is heavily French in its bones even when the dish is as plainly Anglo-American as broiled salmon with caper sauce. Salmon and capers is an old pairing in English cookery, where the sharp brine cut the richness of a fish that arrived at table oilier than most; the white sauce base is the French contribution, a velouté doing the work that melted butter would have done a century earlier. What dates the recipe most precisely is the assumption of abundance: by the 1890s the New England runs of Atlantic salmon had largely collapsed, and the real source of plenty was the Pacific Northwest and its canneries, which let a New York hotel treat tail slices as an everyday cut rather than something to be portioned carefully. The instruction to marinate in oil and herbs before broiling is a French technique the period called mariner.