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Recipes: Salmon
No. 65. Salmone alla Genovese (Salmon) Ingredients : Salmon, Genoese sauce (No. 5), butter, lemon.
Boil a bit of salmon, drain it, take off the skin, and mask it with a Genoese sauce, to which add a spoonful of the water in which the salmon has been boiled, and at the 1 Lemon soles may be used in any of the above-named dishes. last add a pat of fresh butter and a squeeze of lemon juice.
No. 66. Salmone alla Perigò (Salmon) Ingredients: Salmon, forcemeat of fish, truffles, butter, Madeira, croûtons of bread, crayfish tails, anchovy butter.
Cut a bit of salmon into well-shaped fillets, and marinate them in lemon juice and a bunch of herbs for two hours, wipe them, put a layer of forcemeat of fish over each, and decorate them with slices of truffle. Then put them into a well-buttered sauté-pan with half a cup of stock and a glass of Madeira or Marsala, cover with buttered paper, and put them into a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Arrange the fillets in a circle on croûtons of bread, garnish the centre with crayfish tails and with truffles cut into dice, a quarter of a pint of Veluté sauce (No. 2), and half a teaspoonful of anchovy butter. Glaze the fillets and serve.
No. 67. Salmone alla giardiniera (Salmon) Ingredients: Salmon, forcemeat of fish, vegetables, butter, Béchamel, and Espagnole sauce. a a Prepare the fillets as above (No. 66), and put on each a layer of white forcemeat of fish. Cook a macédoine of vegetables separately, and garnish each fillet with some of it, then cook them in covered stewpan. Put croûton of bread in an entrée dish and garnish it with cooked peas, mixed with Béchamel sauce (No. 3), stock, and butter. Round this place the fillets of fish, leaving the centre with the peas uncovered. Pour some rich Espagnole sauce (No. 1) round the fillets and serve.
No. 68. Salmone alla Farnese (Salmon) Ingredients: Salmon, oil, lemon juice, thyme, salt, pepper, nutmeg, mayonnaise sauce, lobster butter, gelatine, Veluté sauce, olives, anchovy butter, white truffles, mushrooms in oil, crayfish.
Boil a piece of salmon, and when cold cut it into fillets and marinate them for two hours in oil, lemon juice, salt, thyme, pepper, and nutmeg. Then make a good mayonnaise and add to it some lobster butter mixed with a little dissolved leaf gelatine and Veluté sauce (No. 2). Wipe the fillets and arrange them in a circle on a dish, and pour the mayonnaise over them. Then decorate the border of the dish with aspic jelly, and in the centre put some stoned Spanish olives stuffed with anchovy butter, truffles, mushrooms in oil, and crayfish tails.
No. 69. Salmone alla Santa Fiorentina (Salmon) Ingredients: Salmon, eggs, mayonnaise, parsley, flour.
Marinate a piece of boiled salmon for an hour; take out the bone and cut the fish into fillets, wipe them, roll them in flour and dip them in eggs beaten up or in mayonnaise sauce, and fry them a good colour. Arrange in a circle on the dish, garnish with fried parsley, and serve with Dutch or mayonnaise sauce.
Any fillets of fish may be cooked in this manner.
No. 70. Salmone alla Francesca (Salmon) Ingredients: Salmon, butter, onions, parsley, salt, pepper, nutmeg, stock, Chablis, Espagnole sauce (No. 1), mushrooms, anchovy butter, lemon.
Put a firm piece of salmon in a stewpan with one and a half ounces of butter, an onion cut up, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley (blanched), salt, pepper, very little nutmeg, a cup of stock, and a glass of Chablis. Cook for half an hour on a hot fire, turn the salmon occasionally, and if it gets dry, add a cup of Espagnole sauce. Let it boil until sufficiently cooked, and then put it on a dish. Into the sauce put four mushrooms cooked in white sauce, half a teaspoonful of anchovy butter, and little lemon juice.
Pour the sauce over the salmon and serve. a No. 71. Fillets of Salmon in Papiliotte Ingredients: Salmon, oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, nutmeg, herbs.
Cut a piece of salmon into fillets, marinate them in oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and herbs for two hours. Wipe and put them into paper soufflé cases with a little oil, butter, and herbs.
Cook them on a gridiron, and serve with a sauce piquante made in the following manner:
Half a pint of rich Espagnole sauce (No. 1) and a dessertspoonful of New Century¹ sauce, warmed up in a bainmarie. 1 Can be obtained at Messrs.
Lazenby's, Wigmore Street, W.
BEEF, MUTTON, VEAL, LAMB, &c.
No. 72. Manzo alla Certosina (Fillet of Beef) Ingredients: Fillet of beef or rump steak, bacon, olive oil, salt, nutmeg, anchovies, herbs, stock, garlic.
Put a piece of very tender rump steak or fillet of beef into a stewpan with two slices of fat bacon and three teaspoonsful of the finest olive oil; season with salt and a tiny pinch of nutmeg; let it cook uncovered, and turn the meat over occasionally.
When it is nicely browned add an anchovy minced and mixed with chopped herbs, and a small clove of garlic with one cut across it. Then cover the whole with good stock, put the cover on the stewpan, and when it is all sufficiently cooked, skim the grease off the sauce, pass it through a sieve, and pour it over the beef. Leave the garlic in for five minutes only.
No. 73. Stufato alla Fiorentina (Stewed Beef) Ingredients: Beef, mutton, or veal, onions, rosemary, Burgundy, tomatoes, stock, potatoes, butter, garlic.
Cut up an onion and three leaves of rosemary, fry them slightly in an ounce of butter, then add meat (beef, mutton, or veal), cut into fair-sized pieces, salt it and fry it a little, then pour half a glass of Burgundy over it, and add two tablespoonsful of tomato conserve, or better still, fresh tomatoes in a purée. Cover up the stewpan and cook gently, stir occasionally, and add some stock if the stew gets too dry. If you like to add potatoes, cut them up, put them in the stewpan an hour before serving, and cook them with the meat. A clove of garlic with one cut may be added for five minutes.
No. 74. Coscia di Manzo al Forno (Rump Steak) Ingredients: Rump steak, ham, salt, pepper, spice, fat bacon, onion, stock, white wine.
Lard a bit of good rump steak with bits of lean ham, and season it with salt, pepper, and a little spice, slightly brown it in butter for a few minutes, then cover it with three or four slices of fat bacon and put it into a stewpan with an onion chopped up, a cup of good stock, and half a glass of white wine; cook with the cover on the stewpan for about an hour. You may add a clove of garlic for ten minutes.
No. 75. Polpettine alla Salsa Piccante (Beef Olives) Ingredients : Beef steak, butter, onions, stock, sausage meat.
Cut some thin slices of beef steak, and on each place a little forcemeat of fowl or veal, to which add a little sausage meat: roll up the slices of beef and cook them with butter and onions, and when they are well browned pour some stock over them, and let them absorb it. Serve with a tomato sauce (No. 10), or sauce piquante made with a quarter of a pint of rich Espagnole (No. 1), and a dessert-spoonful of New Century sauce (see No. 71, note).
No. 76. Stufato alla Milanese (Stewed Beef) Ingredients: Rump steak, bacon, ham, salt, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, butter, onions, Burgundy.
Beat a piece of rump steak to make it tender and lard it well, cut up some bits of fat bacon and dust them over with salt, pepper, and a tiny pinch of cinnamon, and put them on the steak. Stick three cloves into the steak, then put it into a stewpan, add a little of the fat of the beef chopped up, an ounce of butter, an onion cut up, and some bits of lean ham.
Put in sufficient stock to cover the steak, add a glass of Burgundy, and stew gently until it is cooked.
No. 77. Manzo Marinato Arrosto Arrosto (Marinated Beef) Ingredients: Beef, salt, larding bacon, Burgundy, vinegar, spices, herbs, flour.
A run of six salmon dishes in the grand Anglo-Italian restaurant style of 1901, all built on the book's numbered mother sauces. The single change worth making throughout is to the cooking times: this is a book written when fish was cooked until it flaked apart.
- Cook the salmon far lessHalf an hour on a hot fire (No. 70) or twenty minutes in the oven (No. 71's siblings) will take a fillet well past dry. Modern practice is to pull salmon at 120-125F for translucent centres, 130F for firm; a 1-inch fillet needs roughly 8-10 minutes at 350F. For the poached pieces, bring the liquid to a bare shiver and hold it off the boil.
- "Moderate oven"350F / 175C. The buttered paper over the sauté-pan in No. 66 is a cartouche; parchment cut to fit the pan does the same job of trapping steam without sealing.
- The sauce numbersThese reference the book's own foundation sauces: No. 1 Espagnole (brown stock sauce), No. 2 Veluté (velouté, a pale stock-and-roux sauce), No. 3 Béchamel, No. 5 Genoese, No. 10 tomato. In classical cookery a Genoese (génoise) sauce for fish is a red-wine and fish-stock sauce rather than anything like pesto, though the book's own No. 5 is not reproduced on this page. You need those made before you start; none of these dishes stands alone.
- New Century sauceA proprietary bottled sauce sold by Lazenby's of Wigmore Street, as the book's own footnote directs; it is no longer made. Its exact composition is not recorded here, but as a bottled table sauce used a dessertspoon at a time to sharpen a brown sauce, Worcestershire or mushroom ketchup will serve the same purpose.
- VolumesA "glass" of Madeira or Burgundy is not defined in the book; period English measure usually reckons a wineglassful at about 2 fl oz / 60 ml, so treat it as a small pour and adjust. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz / 150 ml British measure, half a pint 10 fl oz / roughly 285 ml. "A cup of stock" is not standardised here either; treat it as 8 fl oz and adjust.
- "Mask" and "croûtons"To mask is to coat the fish evenly in sauce so none shows through. Croûtons of bread here are not the salad kind but shaped slices of bread fried in butter, used as a base to lift the fillets clear of the sauce.
- Compound buttersAnchovy butter and lobster butter are made by pounding the anchovy, or the shells and coral of a cooked lobster, into softened butter and passing it through a sieve. Both are stirred in off the heat at the last moment; boiling them splits the sauce and dulls the colour.
- Papiliotte on a gridironNo. 71 means en papillote. Cooking oiled paper cases directly over coals is how it was done on a range with a grate; parchment in a 400F oven for 8-10 minutes is the practical equivalent and will not catch.
- Crayfish and trufflesCrayfish tails were a standard garnish and are still sold cooked and frozen; langoustine or shrimp stand in. Fresh white truffle (No. 68) is a seasonal autumn item at considerable cost — a good jarred black truffle or none at all is no disgrace.
- Yield"A bit of salmon" and "a piece of salmon" are undefined. Reckon 6 oz / 170 g per person, so a 1.5 lb piece feeds four as a main course with the garnishes given.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was written by Mrs W. G. Waters, who framed a collection of Italian recipes inside a Boccaccio-style conceit: ten diners, ten days, a cook to be learned from. What these salmon entries show is how little of it is domestic Italian cooking. Salmon is not a Mediterranean fish, and the treatments here — velouté, Espagnole, forcemeat linings, truffle décor, fillets arranged in a circle on fried croûtons with a garnished centre — are the international hotel repertoire of the Escoffier generation, given Italian titles. Alla Genovese, alla Fiorentina, alla Milanese: some of these names carry real regional meaning, others are house-style flourishes of the sort that filled restaurant menus in London and on the Riviera. The footnote directing the reader to Messrs Lazenby's in Wigmore Street for New Century sauce is the most period-specific thing on the page — proof that even an ostensibly rustic Italian cookbook expected its English readers to reach for a bottled proprietary sauce, and a reminder that the Victorian and Edwardian kitchen leaned harder on commercial condiments than we usually credit.