Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [158]
Warm a non-stick frying pan until fairly hot. Quickly dip the salmon pieces in olive oil on both sides and put in the pan. Cook gently, without turning them, on one side only. This prevents overcooking. There will be a gradation of effect from opaque next to the pan, to a slight translucency on top. Dry on kitchen paper and arrange on four warm plates with some of the cress.
While the salmon cooks, make the sauce. Bring 125 ml (4 fl oz) water to the boil in a small wide pan. Whisk in the chive butter, bit by bit, raising the pan from the heat so that you end up with an emulsified sauce (beurre blanc technique). Season with salt, pepper and lemon. Pour round the salmon, and serve.
SMOKED SALMON
‘These days there’s a salmon smoker behind every hedge,’ as one producer remarked the other day. I was asking him about the difference between the Scotch and London smoked salmon, in the old days, before things became so confused. He said that the curers in the north, having been used to dealing with kippers and haddock and such, were too heavy-handed with the smoke for such a delicate fish. And so Jewish fishmongers in London started producing it in their own smoke houses, but clean air acts closed them down over the last twenty-five years. Now there is no precise territorial difference, every smoker follows his own taste. And the result will also depend on whether he uses one of the enclosed stainless steel Torry smokers or has made himself a smoke hole.
My own favourite smoked salmon I have bought by post from Ritchie’s on the Isle of Bute for many years now. In 1987, being up in those parts, we thought it would be an amiable detour to visit the brothers who had been so friendly at the other end of a telephone for the best part of fifteen years. We were directed to a tiny fishmonger’s shop in a side street. Nobody there. I coughed discreetly and moved over to a door at the left where the most amazing sight, a fleet of wild salmon, covered the floor of a long narrow room. At the end were the mahogany-coloured walls of the brick-built smoke holes. And just about to begin work, slitting, cleaning, curing, were the tall brothers calmly surveying the labours of the week ahead. All the same, they had time to stop and talk, to show me the tenterhooks on which the sides of salmon hang, taking on flavour from the cool smoke of smouldering sawdust on the floor below.
From this plain, humble-looking place, untouched it seems since the time of the First World War when their fathers built it, comes some of the finest smoked salmon you can ever hope to eat, as delicate as any London cure. The other day I heard about the largest smoke hole in existence, Skarl’s of Brooklyn, where there is room for thousands of salmon sides, with ladders and terraces and walkways. There, too, the cure is delicate. Which all goes to show, there is no rule in the matter as far as size is concerned: in the end, it is the taste of the producer that counts.
If you are ever in the happy position of catching enough salmon to spare some for smoking, I suggest you first consult a good book on the subject. You can buy smokers small enough for home curing, too, by which I do not mean the little metal boxes large enough for a few trout, but the Torry Mini Kiln which has a maximum capacity of 25 kg (56 lb) (marketed by Afos Ltd, Anlaby, Hull, North Humberside). The old home method was to convert a barrel, but you will do far better to build something more convenient. Various designs are given in Home Smoking and Curing, by Keith Erlandson, an excellent book with cures and recipes and such cogent advice as ‘Do not let your ducks catch fire.’
When it comes to heating smoked salmon, you would do best to leave first-quality salmon alone: serve it with wheatmeal or wholemeal bread and butter and be thankful. Some people like lemon wedges so that they can squeeze a few drops over the salmon. Second-quality smoked salmon is just right for adding to scrambled eggs, or wrapping round a cold soft-cooked egg which can be steadied on a circle of bread and