by Tom Stobart
SMOKED SALMON. The word ‘kipper’ probably comes from the Dutch küppen, meaning to spawn, and was first applied to out-of-season salmon, emaciated objects that were usually split and smoked to make them more palatable. From as early as the 14th century, there are references to the ‘kipper times’ in the Thames salmon fishery.
Smoked salmon is now an expensive delicacy. To ensure a continuity of supply, it is prepared mainly with frozen salmon from Canada, Norway, Ireland and Britain. The colour of the flesh can vary from the very pale Polish Delta to the rich red of Canadian. The fat content can also vary from 3% to 20%.
To prepare a whole salmon for smoking, gut it and clean the belly cavity; the thick core of blood next to the backbone should be scooped out with a teaspoon. The head is cut off, and the fish is split into two filleted sides, leaving the lug bones on the fish. As a filleted side is rather soft to handle, a loop of string is passed through the lug flaps under the fin on the lug bone. This facilitates handling and is also used to hang up the side, which is then ready to be brined or dry-salted.
Brining gives a much better appearance to the finished side but makes the drying take much longer. More often, vacuum-dried salt is used. The fillets are laid, skin down, on a 1 cm (½ in) thick bed of salt. The cut surface is sprinkled with salt thickly on the thickest part of the fish, tapering to very little on the thin tail. After salting, which can take 4-5 hours for grilse (young salmon) and up to 24 hours for larger sides, the surface salt is washed off and the fillets are hung to drain. In traditional kilns, the fish can be left to drain overnight before being smoked in a dense smoke for several hours. The smoke is produced from smouldering white wood sawdust, but hardwoods, peat or juniper can be used to impart different flavours.
The finished side should have a pleasant smoky aroma and feel firm when pressed with the finger tips at the thickest part. In a good cure, the weight loss is about one-third from the whole fish.
The sides can be vacuum-packed in plastic sleeves, or sliced, interleaved with cellophane and laid back on the skin before vacuum-packing (this has the appearance of a whole side).Any such smoked salmon products should be kept chilled and can be frozen for longer-term storage.
SMOKIES, normally referred to as Arbroath smokies, are prepared from either small haddocks or small whiting. The fish are gutted, decapitated and cleaned. They are then brined in a strong brine for 30-45 minutes, according to size, and tied in pairs by the tails. The pairs are hung over wooden bars and smoked in pits over billets of wood and wet sawdust until they are cooked and brown coloured. Smoking time is about 2 hours at 71°C (160°F), which is to say that they are hot smoked and the flesh is cooked. Smokies need to be very fresh (when they feel tacky or oily), as they do not keep for more than 4 days even if they are chilled.
For cooking,Arbroath smokies should be skinned, opened to remove the bone, buttered inside and refolded, before being grilled lightly or baked in the oven. They may also be eaten cold, like their *herring equivalent, buckling, or they may be heated by placing them whole in near-boiling water for a few minutes.
SMOKING was originally used, in conjunction with salting and drying, to preserve fish and meat. It may possibly have been done by prehistoric man; certainly it was by the Egyptians and the Chinese, and primitive methods are still used in many parts of the world. For example, East African bongo is made on large oil drums covered at the open end with wire mesh. The fish are laid on the mesh and cooked over a charcoal fire, and then wet wood shavings (or sawdust) are scattered over the embers to produce a dense smoke.
Traditionally, smoked foods were preserved by the combined effects of drying, of bacteria-killing chemicals in the smoke and of the high salt concentrations. Present-day smoke-cured foods, both fish and meat, contain much less smoke and salt, and are thus more dependent on refrigeration to keep them in an edible condition. That is to say, smoking as a method of preservation has been made redundant by the modern technologies of canning, freezing and drying, but it is now valued for the flavour it gives, and for that reason is handled with more subtlety.
Smoking fish, meat, poultry and game is preceded by treatment with salt – either *dry salting or immersion in *brine, which may contain spices and flavourings and perhaps sugar to help tenderize the tougher lumps of meat Books on smoking may well quote brine strengths as a percentage of the strength of a saturated solution -the usual strength is about 80% of saturation 270 g per It (5½ oz per pt) – and the brining time is often much less than it would be if the brining were the only method of preservation: a matter of hours or even minutes rather than days. For large pieces of meat such as hams and haunches of venison, brine can be introduced into the middle, where it might not otherwise penetrate, by means of a brine pump, which is something like a large hypodermic syringe and requires much the same degree of cleanliness to avoid introducing bacteria along with the brine. After brining, most products are hung up to dry before they are smoked.
Books on smoking, such as Keith Erlandson’s Home Smoking and Curing (Barrie & Jenkins), offer all manner of designs for smokers, ranging from sophisticated constructions down to improvisations around such items as empty oil drums and dustbins, dead refrigerators and disused outdoor privies. What all these things have in common is a smoke chamber with ventilation holes at the top and a device to feed the smoke in evenly at the bottom – the simplest is a smoke spreader made of a perforated metal sheet covering the bottom of the chamber. The chamber is fitted with bars from which the food can be suspended in the smoke. Beneath the chamber (or away from it if a smoke duct is built between) is the source of the smoke, a heap of smouldering sawdust. Sometimes there is also a source of additional heat such as a gas ring.
The sawdust used for smoking must not be wet, or it may give a mouldy flavour to the food. That apart, there is no absolute consensus of opinion about the sawdust that should be used. The most favoured are hardwoods such as oak, beech, birch or hickory, which burn slowly and steadily. Softwoods, such as deal, are resinous and are said to produce a bitter taste in the smoked food. Because they also give a good colour, a proportion is sometimes added to the hardwood sawdust. Aromatic woods such as juniper and rosemary may also be burned in the final stages of smoking to add their own special flavour.
The basic smoke-curing process is cold smoking, in which the food is smoked at 10-29°C (50-85°F), and ideally at 24-27°C (75- 80°F).This means that the food is smoked without being cooked, although it is partly dried -the weight loss that results can be used as an indication of how the smoking is progressing (smoking is completed when the weight loss compared with the untreated product is 17-18% for salmon, 25% for cod roe and 12-14% for Finnan haddock). A few cold-smoked foods are eaten raw, among them *smoked salmon, smoked cod roe and smoked fillet of beef, but the majority, including *Finnan haddock, kippers and smoked *bacon, are cooked before they are eaten.
Cold smoking is also a stage in the preparation of hot smoked foods. After the product has been given its smoky flavour and slightly dried by cold smoking, the temperature is raised to about 82°C (180°F) for fish, which is likely to disintegrate at higher temperatures, but anything up to 150°C (240°F) for meat, game and poultry. From its cooking in hot smoke, as long as this has not been too long or at too high a temperature, the result will be delicately flavoured and ready to be eaten cold after it has been left to mature in a cool place for 24 hours. Hot smoked products include smoked mackerel and trout, buckling, *smokies and a variety of smoked game and poultry.
The small smokers, such as the Abu Smokebox, that are sold in kitchen shops produce hot smoked trout and other small items by a rather different method. These smokers are closed boxes heated from below to ignite the sawdust on the floor of the box; the food rests on a rack with a drip tray to prevent the juices from falling on the sawdust. The whole apparatus gets rather hot- hotter than in other hot smoking processes – and the food is cooked in about 20 minutes to give a product that is probably acceptable rather than exquisite.
> The success of smoked foods is almost as dependent on the quality of the raw materials as it is on the expertise of the smoker. Fish must be very fresh (or it can be frozen and freshly thawed) and the blood that lies along the backbone must be scooped out Game birds should not be hung for more than 3 days before they are brined, while beef and venison need to be aged for at least a week Brine should be made up freshly for each batch of food to be smoked, and vacuum-dried salt, which does not have added magnesium carbonate, should be used in making it (or for dry salting).
Cold smoking without prior salting can be applied to a small variety of other foods – a curious assortment, including nuts, bilberries, hard-boiled eggs and cheese. Mild hard or semi-hard cheeses are suitable for smoking. For Austrian smoked cheese, though, it is not the cheese itself but the milk that goes into it that is smoked.
Smoke roasting, a process that is less known in Europe than in America, is cooking meat such as steak or spareribs in hot smoke at 93-107°C (200-2250F) without salting or cool smoking- the meat is simply seasoned and given a coating of oil. Unlike hot-smoked meat, it needs to be cooked.
In the main, smoke-curing is now in the hands of large food manufacturing companies which use modern technology to give a standardized product. Various lines of research have evolved processes for applying smoke in liquid form. The first such technique emerged some 40 years ago, when the Japanese used pure *pyroligneous acid from the destructive distillation of wood. This tasted and smelled like strong vinegar. More modern liquid smokes, some from natural sources and others produced chemically are still in the experimental stage. Applying the theory of electrostatic precipitation, which is used for painting cars, smoke can be deposited on fish and colours it in a matter of minutes. However, it fails to penetrate the surface and is not always pleasant to taste. But sooner or later the scientists will conquer these little problems and come up with a product sufficiently standardized – and characterless – to suit the food industry.
[Smoking – French: fumer German: räuchern Italian: affumicare Spanish: ahumar]
SNAIL. Many kinds of snail are eaten. Even in Britain, snails were traditionally eaten in a few districts; they were thought to be good for the lungs. Glass blowers, for instance, thought that eating snails gave them plenty of breath, and recipes for snail water and snail broth appear in 17th century and earlier recipe books as a remedy for consumption. However, snails were not regarded as a delicious food, but were usually looked on with some disgust, perhaps because of the slime which the snail pours out as a carpet to walk on. ‘l once knew an old woman,’ said the Revd. J.G. Wood (1863), ‘one of the few wearers of scarlet cloaks, who used daily to search the hedges for snails, for the purpose of converting her milk into cream. This cheap luxury was obtained by crushing the snails in a piece of linen, and squeezing their juice into the milk. She showed me the whole process which I afterwards imitated as far as the mixture with the milk, but could not bring myself to test the result by taste.’
The Romans had no such squeamishness and regarded the snail as a luxury. They went in for snail culture, building special houses called cochlearia, in which snails were fattened on a mixture of meal and wine. The scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (116-28 BC) even wrote on the subject in his De re rustica, and the tradition of snail-farming continued in Europe. Today, once more, snaileries are on the increase, although wild snails gathered after rain still form the majority of those eaten. Indeed, so avidly are snails gathered that laws have had to be passed in some countries making close seasons for snails in order to prevent their near extinction. Snails are becoming expensive. In France, where the annual consumption of snails is reckoned in hundreds of millions, you will have trouble finding even a single snail in the Burgundy vineyards- I know, as I have hunted them there. To satisfy demand, snails have to be imported from Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
The snails are alive; canned snails sold with a bag of shells attached are a fairly recent innovation. The best known species of snail for eating is the large Roman snail (Helix pomata), which is called the Burgundy snail by gourmets and is found over much of Europe. It has been introduced into Britain (some say by the Romans but that is doubtful) and it can sometimes be found, but only in chalk or limestone country, as it needs a lot of lime to make its shell. Contrary to popular belief, the common Garden snail (H. aspera) is excellent to eat and, with two other species (H. vermiculata and H. nemoralis) is regarded, for instance by the people of Liguria, as better than the large ‘Burgundy’. Comeford Casey, writing at the turn of the century in his Riviera Nature Notes, says that ‘Labouring men eat Helix pisena and Helix variabilis boiled with beans’ and that ‘Helix operta, the glass snail, is considered a great delicacy by the Niçois, especially when it is found closed by its operculum.’ En passant, we learn that ‘In the “Eight Communes” of the Ventimiglia district a law was passed imposing a fine of four lire on persons caught stealing snails from their neighbours’ ground. If the thief was mean enough to pilfer them by night, the fine was doubled.’ The Italians, however, are not usually such dedicated snail eaters as the French, although they have at least one festival – the Sagra delle lumaca at Molini di Triora which takes place on a Sunday at the end of September – and dozens of regional snail recipes, to set against the better-known French ones.
Small snails are fried with onions, cooked with garlic, rosemary, parsley; tomato, dried fungi, olive oil and white wine; they are also cooked with oil, butter, raisins and pine nuts – even with mint. The Spanish offer snails roasted on rocks and seasoned with salt and oil, snails in paella, and particularly snails poached in a court-bouillon containing wild fennel and eaten with the strong garlic mayonnaise which the Catalans call alioli.
Snails are most easily gathered after rain; a good strategy is to go out at night with a torch. You will need to get a dozen large Roman snails or about twenty of the smaller species (petits gris) per person. When the catch is brought home, put the snails in a box – a tin with holes punched in it for air is good – and keep them for a week while they clean themselves of any plants they may have eaten that are poisonous to humans. (If the snails have been taken from a garden, they may have been contaminated with poison sprays and may die.) During this period, some people starve them completely; others fatten them on lettuce leaves, herbs (like fennel), bran or flour. At the end of the week, the snails should be washed and inspected. Any dead ones must be thrown away.
The next step is to remove the slime. Put the snails in a basin, and mix them with salt – preferably coarse salt- and stir them about gently for 10-15 minutes, until they foam. Some cooks add a little vinegar. Then wash the snails in cold water and repeat the de sliming process if necessary until all the snails’ slime glands are emptied. (It is not a critical process, as the slime is not harmful – peasants preparing small snails often do not bother.) After giving them a final wash, plunge the snails into boiling water for from 3-5 minutes, until it is possible to extract the animals with a fork. Screw each snail out of its shell (this is not done for small species in the snail-eating countries, but I always do it even for large garden snails) and pull off and discard the black ‘visceral spiral’ – which is in the top of the shell. lt is not poisonous, but it contains the liver and, in large snails, is bitter. Now wash the snails, put them into boiling water again for 10 minutes and drain them. Finally, cook them until they are tender (which will take 3 hours for Roman snails, but less for garden snails) in a court-bouillon of salted water flavoured with an onion stuck with a clove, salt and pepper, bay, thyme and parsley. A glass of white wine or a dash of vinegar is usually added. Meanwhile, clean the shells by boiling them for 30 minutes in water with added bicarbonate of soda; rinse them well and dry them.
When the snails are cooked, let them cool in the court-bouillon, and then put them back into their shells with garlic butter. When the snails are required, put them into a hot oven (you can keep the shells upright by pressing them into a bed of salt) for 5 minutes to heat and to melt the butter
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Garlic Butter
This is the standard formula given me by Chef Roy of the Hotel du Nord in Dijon (who also gave me a one-in-a-million Burgundy snail shell with a left-handed spiral), whom I once filmed for television as he prepared snails. The quantities need scaling down for home kitchens. Pound together 200 g (1 oz) garlic, 25 g (1 oz) shallot, 125 g (5 oz) parsley, 1½ teaspoons pepper, 25 g (1 oz) salt and 1 kg (2 lb) good unsalted butter.
Such sophistication would be regarded as very sissy by the peasants who live around me in Majorca. They take their snails, the smaller local species, keep them a few days (while they collect enough) or buy them from the sack in the market, and simply dump them into a pan of cold water and cook them. (They say that the snails draw back into their shells if they are put straight into boiling water.) Salting to remove the slime is said to be necessary only when a tray of live snails are to be put into a hot oven and baked. Snails which have sealed themselves up with a chalky operculum in order to hibernate need to have this seal scraped away before cooking. As they have already been starving, they are the safest of all snails to eat.
[Snail – French: escargot German: Schnecke Italian: chiocciola, lumaca Spanish: caracol]
SNAP BEAN. See kidney bean. US term for green bean.
SNIPE. See woodcock.
SNOEK or Australian barracuda (Thyrsites atun) is a relative of the tunny and the mackerel. It is found in the Southern hemisphere only, and is eaten in south-western Australia, New Zealand, and in parts of South Africa and South America (in Chile, it is known as sierra). Fresh or smoked, snoek is delicate and delicious, and its flavour would be a revelation to those who remember canned snoek as an element in Britain’s post-war austerity diet.
SNOOK or robalo is the name of several pike-like fish from the tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Common snook (Centropomus undecimales) may weigh 14 kg (30 lb), though 1.5-2 kg (3-5 lb) is the average. The flesh has a fine flavour and is found in local markets where the fish is caught (it is a popular game fish in Florida).