Home › The World's Kitchen › Salmon, London Style
Salmon, London Style
Procure a three-pound piece fresh salmon, tail part, split in two, remove spinal bone, and cut each half into three even strips lengthwise. With a larding needle and thin strips of larding pork neatly lard the surface of each piece, then place fish in a lightly buttered baking dish, larded side up. Season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, squeeze over the juice of a quarter lemon, pour in one gill white wine, cover the salmon with a sheet buttered paper and set in the oven for thirty-five minutes, then remove. Mix in a saucepan a level tablespoon butter with a teaspoon flour, then strain fish gravy into pan and stir on range until it comes to a boil, pour sauce over fish and serve.
A straightforward baked salmon whose only real trap is the cooking time, written when fish was expected to be cooked through and flaking. Everything else translates cleanly.
- Cut the time roughly in halfSix strips off a 3 lb tail are thin pieces; thirty-five minutes will leave them dry and chalky. At 350F they are done in 12 to 18 minutes, when the centre reads about 125F and the flesh just parts.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only 'set in the oven.' A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern default. The buttered paper laid over the top helps hold in moisture so the surface does not dry before the interior sets.
- A gillHalf a cup of white wine. If you are using a British measure it would be 5 fl oz, but half a cup is the sensible reading here and covers the bottom of the dish adequately.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper against half a teaspoon of salt. That is a peppery ratio by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon may suit better.
- Larding pork and the needleLarding pork is unsmoked fatback or salt pork, cut into matchsticks and chilled firm before it goes into the needle. Without a larding needle, lay the strips across the top of each piece instead, or drape thin unsmoked bacon; the point is fat basting the lean surface as it renders.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to the size of the dish and buttered on the underside so it will not stick to the fish. Foil works but reflects heat rather than letting the top colour.
- The sauceButter and flour rubbed together, then the strained cooking liquid whisked in, gives a very thin sauce from half a cup of wine plus fish juices. Reduce the strained liquid by a third before thickening if you want it to coat, and taste for salt, as the pork will have contributed some.
- YieldSix strips from a 3 lb tail serve four to six as a main course. Serve at once; the sauce breaks and the fish tightens on standing.
Larding a fish looks eccentric now, but larding lean meat and fish was common in period kitchens: strips of pork fat threaded through the flesh melted as it baked and kept lean pieces from seizing. "London style" in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks may perhaps be read as signalling the plainer English treatment of a prized fish -- wine, lemon, pepper, a thin butter-and-flour gravy from the pan juices -- as against the elaborate garnished presentations of the French repertoire the same books also carried. Salmon itself carried strong English associations for period readers even though the Thames run had collapsed by the early nineteenth century; by the time this book was compiled the fish reaching London and New York tables came in good part from Scotland, Ireland and, increasingly, canneries and ice-packed shipments from the Pacific coast.