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Salmon, Nicholas II
Procure three one-pound slices very fresh red salmon and place in a sautoire one beside another. Add half a sliced carrot, two rings of onions, a branch parsley, clove, two bay leaves and two slices lemon. Moisten with a half gill each vinegar and white wine, pour in just sufficient cold water to cover fish, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, cover pan and let infuse in cool place for six hours. Set pan on corner of range and as soon as broth begins to boil remove to a cool place and allow to cool off thoroughly. Meanwhile prepare mayonnaise, adding to it three melted gelatine leaves, two tablespoons hot milk, and briskly whisk all together for two minutes. Lift up slices of salmon, neatly wipe with cloth and place on a grating one beside another. Evenly spread mayonnaise over slices so that entire top of each slice will be smoothly covered.
Place grating and fish in ice box until thoroughly firm, which will take about an hour, and remove grating to table. Cut a medium truffle in quarter-moon-shapped pieces and decorate top of each slice with it, carefully lift up slices from grating, neatly arrange on cold dish over a folded napkin and fill up hollow space of each slice with finely cut up jelly. Arrange on dish around fish twelve small heart-shaped canapes of Russian caviare, alternating with three cold. hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters, then serve.
A cold chaud-froid of salmon from the grand-hotel repertoire, built over two days' worth of resting and chilling. Almost everything that can go wrong happens in the poaching liquid.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe instruction to pull the pan the moment the broth begins to boil is the whole technique, and even that is hotter than needed. Hold the liquid at a bare shiver, 160-170F, and take the salmon out when the centre reads 130-135F on an instant thermometer; a one-pound slice will need roughly 10-12 minutes from the point the liquid is hot. Boiled salmon sheds white albumen and turns dry and chalky, which no amount of mayonnaise will hide.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill each of vinegar and white wine is 1/4 cup of each. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making the seasoning roughly 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper for the whole pan.
- Sautoire and gratingA sautoire is a wide, straight-sided sauté pan deep enough to cover three thick slices with liquid; a large skillet or roasting pan works. The "grating" is simply a wire cooling rack, which lets the coating set without pooling underneath.
- Gelatine leavesLeaf gelatine of this period ran somewhere around 2 grams a sheet, so three leaves is perhaps 6-7 grams, which works out at roughly 2 teaspoons of modern powdered gelatin, bloomed in cold water and melted. Whisk it into the mayonnaise while both are barely warm; if the gelatin is hot and the mayonnaise cold it will set in threads before it can coat.
- The mayonnaise is rawA homemade mayonnaise here is never cooked and then sits chilled for an hour before serving. Use pasteurized eggs, keep the finished dish refrigerated until the moment it goes to table, and do not hold it overnight.
- The "jelly" and the truffleThe chopped jelly is an aspic, chopped once firm; the recipe does not say how it is made or whether the poaching liquid is reused. Fresh black truffle is a considerable expense for a garnish; thin rounds of black olive or blanched leek green give the same graphic dark crescents.
- Ice boxAn hour in a modern refrigerator will firm the coating. Do not use the freezer, which weeps the gelatin coating as it thaws.
- YieldThree pounds of salmon plus caviare canapés serves six as a cold main course, or eight to ten as part of a buffet. Everything can be assembled several hours ahead and kept refrigerated on its rack.
The dish belongs to the age when hotel kitchens named cold showpieces after living royalty: Nicholas II reigned from 1894 to 1917, so a salmon carrying his name places this squarely in the pre-war restaurant repertoire, and the Russian caviare and truffle in the garnish are the deliberate signals of that dedication. The principle is that of the chaud-froid — food cooked hot, then masked in a sauce stiffened with gelatin so it can be presented cold without collapsing — though the coating here is the mayonnaise version, a mayonnaise set with gelatine rather than a velouté-based one. Cold poached salmon under a set coating was, in the same decades, one of the standard grand luncheon dishes on both sides of the Atlantic; the marinade of vinegar, wine, carrot, onion and bay is simply a court-bouillon assembled cold and left to draw for six hours before any heat is applied.