TOPICAL FISH
Digby Anderson says that most people
make a dog's dinner of salmon — whether it is farmed or wild
SUPPOSE you were given the opportunity to pelt, say, Mr John Prescott with both eggs and impunity, which would you prefer: battery or free-range eggs? 'Silly question. Shut up, just pass us the eggs, as many and as quickly as possible and as stale and rotten as possible.'
Quite. Eggs have many and varied uses, and only for some need they be free-range. At school, on Fridays, they used to give us curried eggs, with green and black yolks. Most of us left them, and a boy I shall call Phillips Minor once ate everybody's — 14 of them. That was when most eggs were free-range, but neither our decision to refuse them nor Phillips Minor's to scoff them all had anything to do with the original quality of the egg. Again, if you are rash enough to drink eight pints of bitter and finish off the evening with three eggs pickled in a vicious nonbrewed condiment, then the housing conditions and diet of the hens that once, very long ago, laid the eggs will not save you. However, if you are making proper Spanish omelet or just poaching a pair of eggs on some smoked haddock, then only the best eggs, preferably duck, will do.
The rule with the provenance of raw ingredients is that what is best depends on what you want to do with it, So the answer to The Question of the New Year — 'Is farmed or only wild salmon good enough for you?' — is clear. It depends on what you are going to do with it.
The English used to take 2 or 3Ib pieces of salmon and poach them either in a fishkettle or in a saucepan with a steamer that did not fit. In either case, somehow the bottom half of the fish boiled, which didn't matter as it was always all overdone. Later on, in the Sixties, it was wrapped in silver paper, but it was still always overdone — and pretty tasteless. Sometimes it had fake hollandaise on it and tasted even less. Sometimes it had slices of cucumber in malt vinegar with stale white pepper served with it and didn't taste at all.
What was even more of a treat, in the days when salmon was expensive, was a whole cold salmon. This too was steamedboiled to death, then laid on a long carver. Bits of it used to collapse and fall off during its translation, and it was patiently rebuilt on the charger. The skin was removed and thin slices of cucumber stuck down its hack. Around the assembled fish were laid carefully overlapped slices of potato or more cucumber. Then people helped themselves. A combination of the wrong implement, the ineptitude of the carvers and the fragility of the overcooked and re-assembled fish meant that within five minutes it looked like Dresden after the great Harris had done his best.
Each diner would then pack all sorts of things round the salmon on his plate. Ghastly bottled mayonnaise, warm, out-ofseason and slightly hard-boiled potatoes and beetroot were favourites. I do not need to describe what happened when the mayonnaise, butter and beetroot vinegar met. These great traditions kept going and are still observed but, during the Seventies, salmon appeared more with a variety of passing sauces often in 'cutlets' which were even later called 'dames' but made no darn difference to the taste Because salmon was considered a treat, it was usually served both after and with plenty of booze. And there you have it: after a couple or more stiff ones, when the salmon has been undermined by overcooking, fallen apart and been reassembled, then sabotaged by unsuitable accompaniments, who cares how or when it passed its formative years?
Wild salmon can be very good but not as it is usually served. Farmed salmon can be treated to be made edible. I buy them as large as possible, skin (cats like the skins if you grill them for them, and no doubt it reduces their cholesterol) and fillet them, then salt the fillets and either serve them a few days later with the salt washed off and accompanied by capers or freshly dug-up horseradish, or pack them in olive oil and keep them a few months. Or serve thin slices of unsalted farmed salmon raw after a few hours in lemon juice and grappa. Farmed salmon is now one of the cheapest fishes available at about £1.50 a pound for a whole fish. So you might want to use it for fish cakes or in fish pastries and pies. But there are better, cheaper and more neglected fish, such as the larger red gurnards; and grey mullet makes outstanding fish cakes When I think about it, I see that I've not got the rule about raw ingredients quite right. There are all sorts of chaps showing off today and saying that only wild salmon is good enough for them. But the question is, are they good enough for it? Of course, the best cooks and palates demand the best ingredients. But the best ingredients demand the best palates and the best cooks. Day by day, surveys tell us more and more about the unspeakable domestic grazing habits of the modern English. Look in any restaurant window and you can see the even worse eating-out habits, the sheer lack of attention given to what is being eaten. And when I monitor the shop windows I see tasteless Dutch fruit and vegetables being snatched up, unhung pink beef, cold-kept dead cheese and stale fish, Last Monday morning I saw some herrings so decomposed I took five minutes to work out what they were. My guess is that they were two weeks old; they were sold by lunchtime. In the same fishmonger I have seen a GP buying a kilo of gaping dead mussels. There has been no food revolution. The nation that pioneered curried eggs and trifle is still at it with a whole lot of new ingredients and lazy practices.
Wild salmon? They don't deserve it. They're not up to it. Let them eat tinned.
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