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Cold Salmon, Mayonnaise
Procure three slices of salmon, three-quarters of a pound each, place in a sautoire with an ounce of butter, one-half gill white wine, two gills water, two tablespoons vinegar, half a sliced onion, a branch parsley, a sprig thyme, a bay leaf and a teaspoon salt, then let slowly come to a boil and boil five minutes. Set pan on a table in a cool place and let get cold. Remove the salmon, place on a cold dish with a folded napkin, decorate with lettuce leaves and serve with a mayonnaise separately.
A court-bouillon poach dressed down to its essentials, meant to be made in the morning and served cold at midday. Two things need attention: the cooking liquid is scant, and the cooling instruction predates refrigeration.
- Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup white wine and 1 cup water, plus 2 tablespoons vinegar. With three thick steaks that liquid will not cover the fish; use a pan just wide enough to hold them in one layer, or scale the liquid up proportionally and poach half-submerged with a lid on.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan with a lid, roughly what a modern 10-12 inch saute pan or a deep skillet gives you. The shape matters here because it keeps the small volume of liquid in contact with the fish.
- Boil five minutesTake this as a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which shreds the flesh and drives out albumin. Three-quarter-pound steaks are thick; five minutes at a shiver plus the carryover as the pan cools will bring them through, but check the thickest part reads 145F or that the flesh just parts from the bone.
- Cooling in the liquidLetting the fish go cold in its own court-bouillon is what keeps it moist, and it is worth doing. Cool the pan quickly, though, in a sink of ice water rather than on a table, and move it to the refrigerator once it stops steaming. Fish held for hours in the temperature range this original assumes is the one real risk in the recipe.
- The mayonnaiseA period mayonnaise is raw-yolk. If it is going with cold fish that will sit on a buffet, make it with pasteurized eggs or use a good commercial jar; the dish depends on the sauce being cold and thick, not on its provenance.
- ServingThe folded napkin on the platter was the conventional dressing for fish at table, and it also takes up the liquid that continues to weep from cold poached fish. A rack over a plate does the same job less decoratively. Peel the skin and lift out the bone before plating, and serve the sauce in a separate boat as directed.
- YieldThree steaks of 3/4 lb each serve six generously as a first course or four as a summer main.
Cold salmon with mayonnaise was one of the fixed points of the Anglo-American summer table from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and its presence in Filippini's International Cook Book reflects the restaurant repertoire he built up over decades at Delmonico's in New York. The technique is a plain court-bouillon: wine, vinegar, aromatics and salt, the acid firming the flesh and seasoning it as it cools. Salmon was a seasonal luxury caught in quantity in early summer, and serving it cold was practical as much as fashionable, since a large fish poached in the cool of the morning could be dressed and held for a midday crowd without further cooking. The napkin-lined platter and the sauce sent to table separately are often associated with service a la russe, the plated, course-by-course style that was increasingly favoured over the older groaning-board arrangement by the time this book was written, though such touches were used under earlier styles of service too.