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By Root 854 0

the wild kind. Often it can be better. For a start, the handling of the fish is more careful, and an autumn farm salmon can be as good as a spring farm salmon, which is not the case with wild fish. In other words, the reliable quality can make up for the less subtle flavour. Outwardly, there is little difference to the casual eye. If you look more carefully, you see that a farm salmon is stubbier, not as streamlined and slender as the salmon which has battled through the seas on long journeys: the tail too is not as vigorously developed on account of its lazier life. When it comes to tasting, if you shut your eyes you may well find it difficult to tell the difference. I should not like to stake my life on getting it right. Once you open your eyes, of course, and see that mind-blasting colour compared with the gentle milky pink of the best wild salmon, you may feel more certain of knowing which is which.

Whenever I get the chance, I buy salmon trout alias sea trout alias (in Wales) sewin, preferably when they are about 60 cm (2 feet) long. The choice of names is confusing, since there are many more in Britain and the States beyond these three – phinock, gillaroo, Galway or Orkney sea trout, orange fin, black tail or fin, bull trout and seal, brown trout – all referring to the same species. For many people, it is the finest river fish, just as sole is the supreme fish of the seas.

There is an effort being made to reduce this nomenclature to sea trout, but when I tried this out at the fishmonger’s I was met with a blank stare. Salmon trout, ah yes! I am sure that this name will stick because it describes so well the excellence of Salmo trutta which combines the good qualities of salmon and trout, and is better than either. It may be no more than a sea-going variety of our native brown trout, but there is a difference in flavour. The pink flesh is firm, without the salmon’s tendency to dry up, and the tidy disposition of the flakes most happily resembles the trout’s. As it weighs ¾–2 kg (1½–4 lb), it is the ideal fish for a small dinner or lunch party in the spring and midsummer. Worth saving up for.

Mrs Bobby Freeman, who writes about Welsh food and ran the Compton House Hotel at Fishguard some years ago, was famous for her Welsh specialities at a time when everyone else in the principality was still engulfed in Windsor Brown Soup and prawn cocktail. She always cooked and served sewin ‘in the local way, i.e. simply and gently grilled, with salty butter, and rough brown bread. The rough texture of the local brown bread contrasts marvellously with the smooth delicate texture of the fish. We advise people to put lots of the salty butter on the hot flesh as they work through the fish as this brings out the delicate flavour best of all.’

Sometimes she served a cucumber sauce (béchamel flavoured with a purée of peeled, steamed cucumber). Rich and highly-flavoured sauces will not do for sewin, she feels, and the cooking must be simple: ‘I once baked a biggish sewin with one or two fresh sage leaves and a thin strip of lemon rind along its inside, and it ruined it.’

HOW TO CHOOSE AND PREPARE SALMON

Children are coloured indelibly, it seems, by their mother’s expertise – or lack of it – in choosing food. Conversations with butcher, baker, nurseryman, are picked up by a pair of ears at counter level and stored in the infant lumber room. So when I came to buy salmon in my turn, I found myself echoing my mother’s words: ‘The tailpiece, please.’ In restaurants, at weddings and parties, I have often eaten the middle cut with pleasure, but when I have to put my own money down on the fishmonger’s counter, it is the moister and better-flavoured tailpiece that I buy. The lower price (bargaining advisable) compensates for the higher proportion of bone to flesh.

Instead of a piece of salmon, you might think of buying a whole fish – grilse and salmon trout come in handy sizes for a small party, grilse up to 3 kg (6 lb), salmon trout up to 2 kg (4 lb). Nowadays salmon is sold in long fillets as well as in the more familiar steaks. You