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Broiled Smoked Salmon
Cut twelve slices from a piece of smoked salmon one-fifth of an inch thick, arrange on a double broiler, lightly baste slices with a little melted butter, then broil two minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, pour a very little melted butter over, decorate with six quarters of lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A two-minute-a-side dish that depends entirely on the salmon you start with. The "smoked salmon" of this period was usually a firm, heavily salted, cold-smoked side sold in slabs and expected to be cooked, not the soft silky slices sold for bagels today.
- Choose the right salmonLook for a firm, dry-cured cold-smoked side, or hot-smoked (kippered) salmon, and cut your own slices. Thin pre-sliced lox will curl, tighten and turn dry in seconds under a broiler.
- One-fifth of an inchThat is roughly 5 mm, thicker than deli slices but still thin. Cut on a slight bias with a long knife; the total weight of twelve slices will depend on how wide the side is.
- Salt is the hingeSome older commercial smoked salmon was cured heavily enough that soaking helped, though this recipe calls for none. Taste a corner raw; if it is aggressively salty, you can soak the slices in cold water or milk for 20 to 30 minutes and pat dry before buttering.
- "Double broiler"A hinged wire grill basket that clamps the fish between two grids so it can be turned in one motion over a fire. A fish basket over a grill does the same job; under a modern overhead broiler, use a rack set close to the element and turn the slices with a thin spatula.
- Heat and timingHigh heat, close to the element, two minutes a side is right for cold-smoked salmon at this thickness. Already hot-smoked salmon needs less, closer to a minute a side, purely to warm and mark it.
- BastingMelted butter brushed on before broiling and a little more after is the whole sauce. Clarified butter browns less and is worth using if you are working directly over coals.
- YieldTwelve slices with six lemon quarters is a breakfast or luncheon dish for six, two slices each.
Before refrigeration and air freight, smoked salmon was preserved food rather than a delicacy eaten raw: sides were salted and smoked hard enough to keep for weeks, and cooking them, by broiling or in a frying pan, was a common way to serve them. The Scots and the Irish sold such sides commercially, and by the late nineteenth century so did smokehouses further afield; the mild, wet, lightly cured salmon we now slice thin and eat cold is largely a twentieth-century product, generally traced to Jewish immigrant appetizing shops in New York adapting an older preservation trade to a market with iceboxes. Its place in the book fits the ambitions of the international cookbooks of this era, which set European and American hotel cooking side by side and treated a plain broiled fish with butter and lemon as a dish worth writing down precisely because a professional kitchen could turn it out in four minutes.