by Tom Stobart
Bacon Fat Dressing
Dice about 100 g (4 oz) of streaky bacon (according to the size of the salad) and fry it gently until it browns and the fat runs out of it. Then deglaze the pan with a tablespoon of vinegar, pour the mixture hot over the salad and mix. This is particularly good for salads of slightly bitter ingredients, like spinach, chicory and dandelion.
There are dozens of salad creams on the market, mostly based on oil -water- vinegar emulsions with flavourings and stabilizers, and sometimes with starch and thickeners. Home-made creamy dressings can be based on *mayonnaise, fresh (or sour) cream, yoghurt or, as with boiled dressings, a cooked ‘custard’ of egg, flour and milk. With a modern blender, it is also easy to make creamy dressings (which will hold for a day) by emulsifying oil, water and vinegar, using no more than mustard or garlic or both as a stabilizer, in the same way that egg yolk is used as a stabilizer in mayonnaise. For example, mix a heaped teaspoon of mustard with water and leave it to brew for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, temper some vinegar with sugar to taste, add salt and put with the mustard in a liquidizer. Blend in the oil, beginning with a few drops at a time, with the liquidizer at full speed. Flavour with herbs if desired.
Thousand Island Dressing
Into 250 ml (½ pt) of mayonnaise, mix 2 teaspoons tomato purée, 1 teaspoon French mustard, a pinch of cayenne pepper and 1-2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce. Then gently stir in 2 dessertspoons each finely-chopped celery and sweet pickle; 1 teaspoon chopped capers and 1 chopped hard-boiled egg. Adjust the seasoning and serve on Iceberg lettuce.
[Salad dressing – French: assaisonement pour la salade German: Salatsosse Italian: condimento per l’insalata Spanish: aliño]
SALAME (plural salami).To many people, salame is one thing- a toughish, dry sausage which, when sliced, is dark red speckled with bits of white – but in Italy there are dozens of different types. Salame is made all over the world – fine types come from Hungary, Germany and Denmark. Plenty of bad salami is also made, even in Italy, where there are scandals over plastic salami from time to time. However, when salame is good, it is very good.
First of all, it is worth mentioning cooked salame (salame cotto) which is an inferior product made from pork, or a mixture of meats not suitable for making raw salame. Salame cotto is relatively cheap and depends almost entirely on spices for its flavour.
It is often dyed red to improve the colour. The more familiar raw salame (salame crudo) is made generally of lean and fat pork, in which case the Italians indicate this with a metal tag bearing the letter S, but sometimes with the addition of beef or other meats (marked SB on the tag). As salame is eaten raw, its safety depends on the action of the salt and on long enough maturation to kill undesirable micro-organisms.
Almost every district in Italy has its own variety, and there is great variation in flavour and quality- in the toughness of the meat, the size of grain, the texture, colour and flavour. Even within a local idiom, there is variation. For instance, salame labelled nostrani (meaning locally made) is often coarser in texture than the usual type for the district. In general, the salame of southern Italy is likely to be more highly spiced than that from northern parts of the country and to contain red pepper. Some sort of classification is possible into lightly and strongly flavoured types:
The lightly flavoured types are those that most of us are familiar with: the Milanese salami (crespone and bindone), and the Hungarian, Tuscan and Alpine varieties. The expensive salame from Felino near Parma, is made from the same quality meat as Parma hams, and contains no spices except a very little pepper. It is not even matured for very long (2-3 months) and has a beautiful sweet taste. Another famous salame in this category comes from around Varzi, a town in the province of Pavia.
Strongly flavoured types of salame include the Genoese (of pork, veal and pork fat), Piedmontese, Neapolitan, Sicilian and Sardinian, as well as salame d’aglio (garlic salame) and salametto. There are also excellent strong types from Yugoslavia, which also produces mild types similar to those from Hungary. Among the more off-beat salamis are the finocchiona and its smaller cousin, the finocchietto, of Florence which are flavoured with wild fennel seed. The salame di cinghiale (of wild boar) is very finely minced and usually contains sugar as well as salt and spices.
Salame di fegato is made of liver with salt, spices and white wine. There are many other flavourings for salame used in Italy and elsewhere. Some of these, such as crushed black peppercorns, are applied externally, while others are added to the contents (as in the orange-coloured Hungarian paprika salame).
American salame comes in German and Kosher as well as Italian varieties. Milano has a fine texture, while Genoa, which is characteristically corded for hanging, is coarser.
Salame should be sliced fine for an hors d’oeuvre, and it is thoughtful to remove the threads of skin, especially if the slices are being put into buttered rolls to make a sandwich.
SALAMELLA. See salsiccia.
SALICYLIC ACID occurs naturally in some plants, notably in birch bark and in the leaves of wintergreen where it is in the form of methyl salicylate, which is the main component of oil of wintergreen. However, it is normally synthesized. It is used as a *preservative, but is illegal in food in many countries, including the US.
[Salicylic acid – French: acide salicylique German: Salizylsauer Italian: acido salicilico Spanish: salicilico]
SALMON originally meant only Salmo solar, a species which spawns and is caught in the rivers of Europe – from Norway to Spain, in Iceland, in one river in Greenland, in Canada and on the East Coast of the US. The name is also given to many closely related fish from other parts of the world, some of which are commonly frozen or canned, and to a few that are unrelated, such as the Indian salmon, the rawas (Eleutheronema tetradactylus).These, like the salmon, are oily fish.
The true salmon is a splendid fish that normally weighs 4-12 kg (9-26 lb) or more. North American and western European salmon live their sea lives somewhere off the coast of Greenland but ascend the rivers to spawn, each salmon returning to the river where it was born. Some salmon come up river in the spring (spring fish) and may be caught in January (for example, rod fishing on the River Tay in Scotland opens on 15th January and netting some three weeks later), but other salmon do not run up river until the summer or early autumn. None, however, spawn until the autumn. The close season varies from river to river. Though regulations vary, salmon may not usually be sold (even if it has been caught legally on rod and line) during the season when commercial netting is not permitted. At such times only frozen or imported salmon will be available. Some salmon migrate to the sea at the end of their first year, but others remain for two or even three years. Before going to sea, the young salmon become silvery and are then known as smolts. Some fish remain in the sea for only a year before returning to their river to spawn; these are excellent small salmon of 1.5-3 kg (3¼-6½ lb), known as grilse. Only when a fish has lived for 2-3 years in the sea does it return as a fully grown salmon. After salmon have spawned they are known as kelts. They are thin and useless, as they have starved themselves during their time breeding in the river. Some kelts make it back to the sea in December and return for a second, and more rarely, a third time, to breed, but many die after only one spawning.
If you can afford it, you may eat fresh salmon happily from February through the summer to the end of August, the best fish being by repute the first spring fish. For the rest of the year, though, salmon will come chilled or deep-frozen from Canada, Norway or Japan. Fresh salmon should indeed be as fresh as possible, because after a few hours the creamy ‘curd’ disappears and the delicate flavour begins to go. Like other fresh fish, it is stiff, shiny and bright. The best fish are said to have large ‘shoulders’ and a small head. Most buyers, though, will be thinking of just a cut from a fish, in which case the middle part is the best.
Salmon is scaled and cleaned in the normal manner before cooking. It may be poached for roughly 20 minutes per kg (10 minutes per lb) plus 20 minutes
extra in a court-bouillon, but the water must never boil – a trick to make certain of this is to take out some of the hot liquid and substitute cold, thus lowering the temperature. An adaptation of the Chinese method of crystal cooking, used for chicken, also works well for salmon. The court-bouillon in which the salmon rests is kept just on the boil for 3 minutes, then the heat is turned off and the lid is kept on tight. The salmon will be cooked when the liquid is cold. Salmon is excellent grilled, steamed, or cooked in many other ways (see, for example Alan Davidson’s North Atlantic Seafood, Penguin). *Smoked salmon is a delicacy in its own right.
In the past, salmon was abundant in European rivers -there is a much-quoted servant’s contract which stipulated that salmon should not be served more than twice a week. By the beginning of the 19th century, however, the pollution of rivers was well under way, and over-efficient netting depleted the fish population still further. In North America, salmon was also super-abundant, and the Indians once made pemmican from dried salmon. Later, salmon was canned in huge amounts, and in this form it could be called a poor man’s food up to World War ll.
Pacific and North American salmon. In North American rivers, Salmo solar averages only 4.5 kg (10 lb) in weight. It is much less important commercially than the Pacific species of salmon, which belong to the related genus Onchorhynchus. These are the basis of a huge canning and fishing industry that deals with a million tons of salmon a year.
Of the Pacific salmon, one, the Cherry Salmon (O. masu) is found in the sea off Japan. The other five are found in North American rivers that feed into the Pacific (and in some cases on the Asian side of the ocean as well). In ascending order of size, these salmon are the Pink or Humpback (O. gorbuscha), the Sockeye or Red (O. nerka), the Coho or Silver (O. kisutch), the Chum or Dog (O. keta) and the Chinook, King or Spring (O. tschawytscha) which averages 10.5 kg (23 lb) but not uncommonly reaches 23-36 kg (50-80 lb).The Pink salmon and the Coho salmon are also found in the Atlantic. In general, the life cycle of Pacific salmon is similar to that of Salmo salar, although the time spans vary according to species; the salmon may be anything from two to eight years old when it makes its spawning run up river. Pacific salmon normally die after spawning, which takes King salmon and Chum salmon as much as 2,000 miles from the sea to the headwaters of the Yukon River.
In commercial terms, the Pink salmon is the most important, making up half the catch, with the Chum salmon accounting for a third and the Sockeye salmon for almost all the rest. The Chinook salmon and the Coho salmon are much sought by the sporting fisherman. In Russia, the roe of the Chum salmon is made into red *caviar.
[Salmon – French: saumon German: Lachs Italian: salmone Spanish: salmon]
SALMONELLA. See poisoning.
SAL PRUNELLA or sal prunelle. Sal prunella is old-fashioned, crude *saltpetre in the form of cakes, and is often mentioned in farm cures for ham and bacon. Being impure, and having been heated, it contains potassium nitrite as well as nitrate and so gets off the mark quickly. It is safer to use formulae which do not include it.
SALSICCIA is a general term in Italy for any smallish sausage, whether fresh or dried. Such sausages are made in many regional types all over Italy. The ordinary salsiccia fresco (fresh) or luganega is usually thin and continuous, not pinched or twisted into individual sausages. The salsiccia salamella is thicker more the size of the British banger – and is divided into sausages with looped string. Its varieties include the salamelia milanese (from Milan) and the salamelia vaniglia (flavoured with vanilla).Then there are the salsiccia toscana (with garlic, pepper and anis), salamella di cinghiole (wild boar), salsicciaa da riso and salsiccia da potata (containing rice and potato), salsiccia bolognese (from Bologna, containing minced heart and lungs), salsiccia napoletana (from Naples, a pork and beef sausage strongly spiced with red pepper), salsiccia matta (made of giblets and spleen), salsiccia di fegato (liver flavoured with pepper and fennel seeds).These sausages are usually to be eaten cooked, but some of them are smoked, including salsiccia di Palermo and salsiccia milanese affumicata (smoked sausages from Milan), and some are hung to dry for a couple of months before eating – salsiccia secca or salsiccia asciutta.
SALSIFY, oyster plant or vegetable oyster (Tragopogon porrifolium) is a purple-flowered composite related to lettuce. Its long, white taproots, which look something like very slender parsnips, make an excellent winter vegetable. Salsify is popular in France and Italy but is out of fashion in Britain and the US, being more likely to turn up in cans in the supermarket than fresh at the greengrocers’s. Often confused with salsify, and often preferred to it by those who know the difference, is the closely related scorzonera or Black salsify (Scorzonera hispanica), which has black-skinned roots and yellow flowers. Like salsify, it is a native of southern Europe. In the Middle Ages, scorzonera was valued as a medicine rather than as a vegetable; later, it was strongly recommended as a vegetable by the head of Louis XIV’s kitchen. In Britain, the roots were not just eaten as a vegetable but were also candied.
The eclipse of scorzonera as a vegetable has been attributed by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde to the custom of peeling root vegetables, which appears to have become prevalent in the Victorian period. Scorzonera suffers more than other roots from peeling as it bleeds profusely. Both salsify and scorzonera are best dealt with by washing off the earth and cooking them whole in boiling salted water for 30-45 minutes or by steaming for perhaps an hour until they are tender. The skins will then rub or scrape off quite easily, and the roots can be cut into short lengths ready for further treatment (it is in this form that salsify is canned). Salsify and scorzonera may be served cold with sauce vinaigrette and hot au gratin or fried in butter. The young leaves of both plants can be used in salad, and Boulestin recommends putting the young flowers of scorzonera in omelettes.
Another member of the same genus as salsify is goat’s beard or jack-go-to-bed-at-noon (Tragopogon pratensis). It is a common roadside plant in Europe and is cultivated in Italy under the name barba di frate or barba di prete (monk’s or priest’s beard). Its tuft of grass-like leaves is eaten, cooked like spinach, but it does not break up and is considered a delicacy. In Britain, where a small form is found, the tap-roots of goat’s beard were once eaten like those of salsify.
[Salsify – French: salsifis German: Bocksbart Italian: sassefrica Spanish: salsifi]
SALT or, more precisely, common salt is sodium chloride (NaCI).An essential item in the diet of humans and other animals, it is also a basic taste which is detected on the tongue; food without it tastes insipid. Salt has been extracted and used since Neolithic times. It became an important article of trade in the Bronze Age.
Most of us today get too much salt in our diet-we like it, partly as a result of becoming accustomed to it at a very early age, and so we wolf such things as salted peanuts, salt meat and olives. Too much salt is a contributory factor in heart disease and perhaps also in other diseases as well. The only time we are likely to need supplementary salt is when we are sweating profusely, whether crossing a desert or labouring in a steelworks. The natural reaction then is to drink large amounts of fluid, but sweat contains salt as well as water, and both need to be replaced – lack of salt can cause heat exhaustion.
The global reservoir of salt is the sea- it has been calculated that there is enough salt in the sea to cover the world’s land masses to a depth of 35m (115 ft).The average concentration of salt in seawater is about 35 g per It (¾ oz per pt), but the Red Sea is about 15% saltier, while the Dead Sea contains a staggering 200 g per It (4 oz per pt). On the other hand, the Black Sea is less than averagely salty and the Caspian Sea is only brackish – cows come down to it to drink.
Sodium chloride is only the most important of many salts in seawater. The next, in descending order of concentration, are magnesium chloride, magnesium sulphate (Epsom salts), potassium sulphate, calcium carbonate, and potassium and sodium bromides. Salts of many other elements are also found, some of them in infinitesimally small quantities. Sea salt d
oes not contain all these things in the same proportions unless it is completely unpurified, made by drying out seawater completely. Often, only part of the mineral content is crystallized out from seawater, and sea salt may also have been partially purified by recrystallization.
Sea salt is evaporated naturally in bays or enclosures and is also called bay salt in older books or gros sel. Salt may be produced in a similar way from salt marshes. The bays may be dried out completely or the salt crystals raked out of a saturated solution. Sea salt may also be made by evaporating the water over a fire, and was once made in quantity by this means, in wide earthenware pans – a method that dates back to the Iron Age, if not earlier.
Rock salt is found in deposits derived from the drying of ancient seas. It may be mined as a crystalline mineral, but a more modern and prosaic method is to pump water down into the salt, remove the brine which is formed, and evaporate it. The flavour of rock salt depends on the impurities present- ancient seas did not necessarily have the same composition as those of today – and some deposits may contain poisonous substances, such as arsenic. They may be stained red with iron or grey with other minerals. Edible rock salts in a roughly crushed form are sold for use in the wooden salt mills that some people use at table.
The old-fashioned block salt was made with crystalline salt poured into moulds when it was still hot from the evaporating pans. It contained just enough dampness to stick the crystals loosely together in the block. In the kitchen, it had to be grated. Dairy salt and cheese salt were varieties of block salt that had been crushed mechanically and were sold in sacks. This crushed salt is basically the ordinary type of kitchen salt used today. Block salt itself is no longer common but is still produced in England by Ingram Thompson’s Lion Salt Works at Nantwich. Salt produced by the open pan method is 98.5% pure sodium chloride, the rest being mainly gypsum (calcium sulphate).When open pan salt is used in *brine for meat, the calcium sulphate reacts with the phosphates in the meat to form insoluble calcium phosphate, which makes the brine cloudy. Vacuum salt, evaporated and purified in vacuum pans, does not cause this problem as it is 99.9% pure and contains virtually no gypsum. It is free running and is the basis of table salt, which is very finely ground and has had magnesium carbonate added to prevent caking. Sometimes starch and other carbonates and bicarbonates are also included. Dendritic salt, a new form of salt with star-shaped crystals, has a tine, soft and floury texture. lt is particularly used in manufactured seasonings and for mixing with spices. It is made from purified brine in vacuum pans and is 99.64% pure. Pickling salt is a very pure salt, since impurities can darken pickles.