Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [47]
• If possible, buy from a cheese store where the stock is unpackaged and fresh. A good store will let you sample the cheese.
SALMON
Salmon begin their lives in small rivers and streams, later making their way to the sea, where they spend their adult years and where, for centuries, their whereabouts were unknown. In the end, they almost magically return home to spawn and die. This final act, upstream and against all obstacles, males and females together, can be an epic struggle. Before attempting it, the salmon feed heavily, and once they have begun, they eat nothing more. Their lower jaws are extended and hooked, as if in determination. After spawning, most of them die.
Salmon were once so numerous that they were a common food for the poor. Salmon and poverty went together, Dickens said. The Rhine, the Thames, and even the Seine as far inland as Paris were rich in salmon, but pollution and in certain cases the building of great dams have drastically reduced their breeding grounds. Salmon are still plentiful, but for the most part they are farmed salmon, raised in pens. Their flavor and quality are not as good, though some deny this. Their flesh is fattier, and even its attractive color comes from chemicals added to the food pellets the fish are fed. As Waverly Root noted, salmon are like men, and too soft a life is not good for them.
Smoked salmon almost without exception is farm-raised, though smoked wild salmon from Scotland or Ireland can sometimes be found. Lox, a popular term for smoked salmon along with Nova, really means salmon cured in brine, though real lox, like wild salmon, is hard to find. Gravlax or gravid lax, the Swedish version, is raw salmon pressed and preserved in salt, sugar, vinegar, pepper, and dill. It is especially good with black bread.
A good friend and exceptional cook, Belinda Frishman, makes her gravlax this way:
GRAVLAX
2 tablespoons coarse salt
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons coarsely ground pepper
1 3- to 5-pound whole filleted
salmon, cut in half
Fresh dill to taste
Vodka or aquavit to taste
Mix together the salt, brown sugar, and pepper. Rub the mixture thoroughly into both sides of the salmon. In a Pyrex dish, lay one half of the salmon skin-side down on a layer of fresh dill, place additional dill on top, and then lay the second half of the salmon flesh-side down, on top, adding more dill to the top. Moisten with vodka or aquavit. Cover with another glass or Pyrex dish in which you can set bricks or canned foods to press the salmon. Refrigerate overnight or up to a maximum of about twelve hours. Wipe off the dill, salt, sugar, and pepper with the aid of a little more vodka. To serve, chill briefly in the freezer to make it firm enough to slice thinly. It is even better after it has been frozen. It can be cut into smaller pieces before freezing for easier handling. Serves at least twenty-four.
BOSWELL MEETS JOHNSON
On this spring evening in 1763, James Boswell had just finished tea at a bookshop near Covent Garden when Samuel Johnson, the most famous literary figure of London, whom Boswell had been eager to meet, arrived unexpectedly. Boswell, nervously remembering Johnson’s reputed prejudice against the Scots and hoping to deflect it, lightly apologized, “Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.”
“That, Sir,” replied Johnson, “I find, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help.”
Others might have been flattened, but Boswell persevered, and on that day and many that followed, they took meals, tea, and stronger drink together. As different temperamentally as men could be and despite more than thirty years’ difference in age, they nevertheless forged a friendship that carried them both into immortality.
Over the next two decades they walked, talked, and often raised a glass together. Johnson held forth on the subject of drink, saying of claret that it was so weak “a man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk …. Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men, but he who aspires