The Chemistry of CookeryWilliams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
The Chemistry of Cookery
Williams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Cooking
To demonstrate this experimentally, take two equal slices from the same
salmon, cook one according to Mrs. Beeton and other authorities by
putting it into cold water, or pouring cold water over it, then heating
up to the boiling-point. Cook the other slice by putting it into
water nearly boiling (about 200° Fahr.), and keeping it at about 180°
to 200°, but never boiling at all. Then dish up, examine, and taste.
The second will be found to have retained more of its proper salmon
colour and flavour; the first will be paler and more like cod, or other
white fish, owing to the exosmosis or oozing out of its characteristic
juices. When two similar pieces of split salmon are thus cooked, the
difference between them is still more remarkable. I should add that the
practice of splitting salmon for boiling, once so fashionable, is now
nearly obsolete, and justly so.
I was surprised, and at first considerably puzzled, at what I saw of
salmon-cooking in Norway. As this fish is so abundant there (1_d._ per
lb. would be regarded as a high price in the Tellemark), I naturally
supposed that large experience, operating by natural selection, would
have evolved the best method of cooking it, but found that, not only in
the farmhouses of the interior, but at such hotels as the ‘Victoria,’
in Christiania, the usual cookery was effected by cutting the fish
into small pieces and soddening it in water in such wise that it came
to table almost colourless, and with merely a faint suggestion of what
we prize as the rich flavour of salmon. A few months’ experience and
a little reflection solved the problem. Salmon is so rich, and has so
special a flavour, that when daily eaten it soon palls on the palate.
Everybody has heard the old story of the clause in the indentures of
the Aberdeen apprentices, binding the masters not to feed the boys on
salmon more frequently than twice a week. If the story is not true it
ought to be, for full meals of salmon every day would, ere long, render
the special flavour of this otherwise delicious fish quite sickening.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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