Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [146]
‘But what about salmon? All that salmon in the hall?’
‘Oh that. It’s going down to London by the night train.’
And that kind of salmon, pink and curdy, precious, occasional, was the standard one judged by. There were other sorts of salmon about, frozen Canadian, useful for fishcakes. Then there was canned salmon of the north country high tea and the larder standby for a soufflé or mousse. Canned salmon has strange romantic names on the label, which mystified me for years – chinook and coho, sockeye and chum. What could they mean? Now I know that chinook and coho are the best Pacific salmon, and that springtime chinook from the Copper River in Alaska may well equal Scottish salmon if you eat it fresh on the spot. Chum salmon is the least fat of these salmon, and so the least good of the canned ones. But there again, confusion – as quality also depends on the state of the salmon when it is caught and canned. General good advice is to stick to a brand that you find satisfactory. I remember a tasting of canned salmon about six years ago. Considering the price, none of them was much good. I imagine that with so much farm salmon around, at low prices, sales of canned salmon must drop.
Farming, or aquaculture, is the new thing in salmon. One can see the point and importance of it. The system is a good idea. Judging by the disastrous trout farming industry in Britain, it is the people who run the system who are not always a good idea. They are after fast growth and the quick buck, the spiv mentality, fine for a ten-year bonanza (if that, judging by the disappearance of trout farms in some areas).
Will this happen to farm salmon? I would think not.1 For a start the whole enterprise is bigger, needs more capital, more planning. And there is the high standard already set by Norway.
A few years ago, we went to Bergen to see the salmon farming there. We had already come across a good deal of Norwegian salmon in local markets in France. It was good when fresh. The smoked sides tend to be bright pink and coarse in flavour – although there are excellent smokers supplying the best shops and restaurants, their skills do not seem to reach provincial sales – but that is not the salmon’s fault or the salmon farmer’s. In Bergen, we were in the capable hands of Mr Mowinkle. He had inherited a jam factory when he was still quite young, a modest affair. Jam, I gather, did not appeal to him very much. He set off round Germany, because it was the richest country in Europe, to see whether he couldn’t discover something that German chefs would like to have that he could produce, something that was in short or capricious supply. Salmon was the answer, high quality salmon.
Mr Mowinkle took off in a small way, then grew bigger and bigger. Now up and down the west coast of Norway, he has tucked netted pens of salmon into grooves and inlets of the low grey rocky shore. They are fed judicious mixtures of fish pounded into a feed with krill (the tiny crustacea that it contains is what keeps the salmon an elegant pink, a colour that in Scottish farms is supplied by cathaxanthin often with horrible garish results that make a reasonably discriminating buyer wary). Mr Mowinkle’s salmon are carefully handled, laid into boxes of crushed ice for their journeys to Europe and North America, even to Japan so high is the quality. And each salmon is tagged at the gills with the grey MOWI mark. I wish this system would be adopted here, then if one buys a salmon one particularly likes, a pleasant experience has a good chance of being repeated.
Farm salmon of this quality is indeed difficult to distinguish from