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Salmon Toast
Cut as many slices of bread as are required, trim off the crusts, and toast them to a delicate brown; butter them, and lay on each slice a very thin piece of smoked salmon; sprinkle over with pepper, cover with a sheet of buttered paper, and place them in a brisk oven for a few minutes. When very hot, arrange the pieces of toast on a hot dish, on which has been spread a folded napkin, garnish with parsley, and serve.
A savoury in the English style, meant to come to the table blazing hot on a folded napkin. Everything hinges on brief heat: the salmon is already cured and smoked, and the oven is only there to warm it through.
- "A brisk oven"A hot oven, roughly 400-450F in modern terms, though the book gives no temperatures. The toast is already browned and the fish already cured, so nothing is being cooked; the recipe asks only for "a few minutes". Longer and cold-smoked salmon turns opaque, weeps oil and firms up unpleasantly.
- Buttered paperParchment brushed with butter does the job, laid directly over the slices. It keeps the edges of the salmon from drying and curling in the dry heat; foil works but traps steam and softens the toast.
- Which salmonOscar means cold-smoked salmon, sliced thin and translucent — what a shop today sells as lox or Scottish smoked salmon. Hot-smoked salmon, the flaky kind sold in fillets, will not lie flat and is wrong here.
- SeasoningPepper only, and the recipe is right to say so. Cured salmon carries all the salt the dish needs; cayenne turns up in place of black pepper in other savouries of the period.
- The breadThe recipe does not specify; thin slices from a close-crumbed white loaf suit it best. Thick modern sandwich bread goes leathery under the paper before the fish is warm.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on the platter was standard service; it is usually said to absorb butter and steam, helping the underside of the toast stay crisp on its way to the table.
- Yield and courseThe recipe gives no yield ("as many slices of bread as are required"); reckon one to two slices a head, cut into fingers if serving with drinks. It suits the end of a dinner as a savoury, or a breakfast or supper table, rather than a main course.
Salmon toast belongs to the family of hot savouries — anchovy toast, sardines on toast, Scotch woodcock — that English dining sent to table after the sweet course and that American hotels also took up in the late nineteenth century. The convention of laying the dish on a folded napkin, which Oscar Tschirky repeats throughout The Cook Book (1896), is straight from that service tradition: it is generally said to have steadied the plate and soaked up grease when courses travelled a long way from kitchen to dining room. A hotel kitchen working in this style could rely on thin, even slices of cold-smoked salmon without curing anything itself. What reads now as a light breakfast dish belonged, in Oscar's dining room, to the savoury course.