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Pickled Salmon
Boil a salmon, and when cooked take it carefully out of the liquor, and leave it until cold, reserving some of the cooking-stock. Remove the bones from the salmon and put it in a deep dish. Mix with the reserved liquor an equal quantity of vinegar, four bay leaves, one tablespoonful each of allspice and black pepper, and a small quantity of salt; pour it over the fish. Keep the salmon in a cool place, and on the following day it will be ready for use. Pickled Salmon, Turkish Style Procure six pounds of salmon, and cut it into slices; wash, dry them on a cloth, rub them over with salt, and fry them in olive oil until nicely browned on both sides. Pour three pints of vinegar into a saucepan, with two tablespoonfuls each of powdered sugar and saffron-water, and stir them over the fire until on the point of boiling. Cover the bottom of a jar with bay leaves and myrtle leaves, then put in the slices of fish, placing between each layer pieces of garlic, skinned pistachios, peppercorns, mixed spices, and bay and myrtle leaves, cover the top slices with bay leaves and myrtle leaves, and pour over the boiling vinegar. Put a plate over the jar with a weight on the top to press the contents down, and leave them for three or four days. At the end of that time the pickle will be ready for use; it may be preserved for a considerable length of time.
Two versions of the same idea sit side by side here: a quick overnight vinegar marinade and a heavily spiced Turkish pickle meant to keep for months. Both rest on a nineteenth-century assumption about cold storage that no longer holds, and the second is a preserving recipe with no measured acidity at all.
- Why this fails — unmeasured acidA safe pickled fish depends on the finished brine reaching and holding a known acidity, roughly pH 4.6 or below, throughout the flesh. The first version dilutes the vinegar with an equal volume of fish cooking stock, leaving the final acidity unknown and giving no assurance that the acid reaches the interior of the fish; the second gives three pints of vinegar of unstated strength against six pounds of oil-fried fish and no way to check the result.
- Why this fails — Clostridium botulinum type ECold-water fish carry the non-proteolytic type E strain, which grows at refrigerator temperatures and produces toxin without spoiling the food in any way you can see, smell or taste. A weighted jar pressed down under a plate, held for three or four days and then kept "for a considerable length of time" is exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid, ambient-temperature setting that strain wants.
- "A cool place"In 1896 this meant a stone larder or an ice chest, perhaps 45–55°F. Even at the cold end that is a growth temperature for Listeria and for type E botulinum in a weakly acidified fish. If you want pickled salmon, use a current tested recipe with stated vinegar strength and refrigeration.
- Saffron-waterNot a commercial product. It meant saffron threads steeped in a little hot water, which was then measured by the spoonful.
- Myrtle leavesCommon myrtle (Myrtus communis), a Mediterranean aromatic with a resinous, juniper-like note, still used in Sardinian and Turkish cooking. It is not a supermarket herb in the United States and has no direct substitute; bay carries none of the same resin.
- "Mixed spices"An unspecified house blend rather than a fixed formula; in a pickle of this kind it might include allspice, coriander, cinnamon and clove, with the peppercorns already listed separately.
- The tablespoonfuls of spiceThe recipe does not say whether the allspice and black pepper are whole or ground. A tablespoon each of whole spice is an unremarkable pickling quantity; read as ground spice, as some modern eyes would, it becomes overwhelming.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) ran to some 900 pages and was as much a reference shelf for a large hotel kitchen as a book for households, which is why a plain English pickled salmon and an elaborate "Turkish style" jar of the same fish appear in a single entry. Pickling was one of the ordinary ways to hold cooked salmon before mechanical refrigeration reached the domestic kitchen — salting and smoking also served — and versions of the first method — boil, cool, cover with spiced vinegar — appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward. The second is often said to reflect an Ottoman-influenced repertoire, where saffron, pistachio, garlic and myrtle signalled the eastern Mediterranean; whether any Turkish cook would have recognised it is another question, since "à la turque" on a Gilded Age menu was often a set of ingredients rather than a documented dish.