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Fried Kippered Salmon
Put the slices of kippered salmon in a deep dish, cover them with salad oil, and let them macerate for several hours. Drain the oil off the salmon into a fryingpan, and when boiling put the pieces of salmon in and fry them quickly for four or five minutes. Drain the salmon, put it on an ornamental dish-paper or a folded napkin, on a hot dish, garnish the dish with slices of lemon and serve at once.
A breakfast and supper-room dish that depends almost entirely on the fish you buy. Two things decide the outcome: the salmon must be the firm, salt-cured kind, and the oil must be properly hot before the fish goes in.
- What kippered salmon meantIn period American usage this generally meant salmon split, brined and smoked until firm and quite salty, sold in thick pieces rather than the limp cold-smoked slices sold today. Look for hot-smoked or "kippered" salmon sold in solid pieces; slices about half an inch thick hold together in the pan. Silky cold-smoked salmon will fall apart and turn oily.
- Salad oilPeriod American recipes mean a mild olive oil or cottonseed oil. Any neutral oil with a decent smoke point works; a light olive oil is closest to the original character.
- The macerationSeveral hours in oil is less a marinade than a way of softening hard-smoked fish and coating it for the pan. Two to three hours at cool room temperature is plenty, and refrigerate if you go longer.
- "When boiling"Oil never boils in the kitchen sense; the phrase means hot enough to shimmer and sizzle instantly, roughly 350-375F. Use enough drained oil to film the pan generously, and add fresh oil if the marinade has not yielded much.
- Four or five minutes is for thick slicesThat timing suits a half-inch cut of dense, firm-smoked fish. Thinner pieces need two to three minutes total, turned once; the fish is already cured and cooked through, so you are only browning it. Overcooking dries kippered salmon into something stringy.
- SaltDo not season before frying. Taste a corner of the cooked fish before adding anything at the table; well-cured kippered salmon usually needs none, and the lemon does the rest.
- Dish-paper and napkinA folded linen napkin or a doily-cut sheet of paper on the platter absorbed the frying oil at table. A wire rack and a few moments' draining accomplish the same thing before plating.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Reckon 3 to 4 oz of salmon per person as a breakfast or light supper dish, served with lemon and buttered toast.
Kippering, the split-brine-and-smoke treatment best known from herring, was applied to salmon throughout Britain and the North Atlantic trade. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel who put his name to this collection in the 1890s, was not himself a cook, but the book records the working repertoire of a hotel that fed New York around the clock, and dishes like this one, quickly fried and dressed with nothing more than lemon and a folded napkin, are the plainest evidence of that.