How to eat: smoked salmon
How to Eat was 21 years old when it first encountered smoked salmon. Back in [DATE REDACTED] it was still a rarity, served, in this instance, as part of a baffling university buffet at an English department event for a visiting author. By the third year, the drill was familiar: sit in the pub until the talk finishes, slip in under cover of the concluding applause for free food, and, wait … what even is that?! It’s raw!
In the intervening decades, smoked salmon has escaped that ivory tower and now sits in every supermarket, a victory for the democratisation of experience, if not the quality of smoked salmon. Salmon consumption has tripled globally in the last 40 years.
The vast majority of that salmon is farmed and some of it really isn’t very good. It also creates complex ecological issues that make it prudent to eat Britain’s most popular fish infrequently and to shop for salmon that is MSC-certified as sustainable.
High-end and traditionally smoked wild salmon – at its best firm and meaty, drier and less fatty, elegant and restrained in its carefully structured flavours – is so expensive (sailing upwards from £6 per 100g), that you are unlikely to be eating it regularly. If you are in that privileged position, those sides of salmon should offer layers of flavour worth lingering over.
Mass-produced smoked salmon is a different matter. Quality-wise, it is a very mixed bag: fast-growing, farmed fish are often unimpressively flabby and oily, and – in a significant number of cases – smoked in a way that delivers, not balanced flavours, but aggressive blows of salt, spice and smoke. Luckily, there are worse things to be hit by and, while such smoked salmon is more letdown than luxury if eaten on its own, it is still a useful ingredient – used almost as intense seasoning. Even terrible smoked salmon can make itself useful in a paté or quiche. Like culinary Polyfilla, eggs and cream cheese can smooth over many cracks.
Fundamentally, then, unless you blow big bucks on it, smoked salmon is invariably better “in” rather than “on” things. But what? And how? That is where How to Eat – the series identifying how best to eat Britain’s favourite foods – can help.
Smoked salmon: naked
If you have the very finest smoked fish money can buy, go for it. That will be a memorable plate of food, even without capers or a spritz of lemon. If