Food - Bee Wilson tickles out the truth about smoked salmon
Wild smoked salmon is that wonderful thing - a completely natural, completely delicious food which nonetheless swims against the dogma of "natural food". In Scotland, the wild salmon season has just begun. And, with it, the season for netting those faddists who'd rather eat a lump of earth if it were labelled "organic" than a lump of caviar if it weren't.
In theory, wild salmon should be a dream cause for "natural" food lovers to take up: it is pure, free-ranging, and very expensive. Unlike farmed salmon, which is caged and fed a fattening diet of pellets, wild salmon grazes and snacks on a varied diet wherever it swims. Farmed salmon is near-sedentary, pale and flabby. It is fitting that farmed salmon are susceptible to ISA, or Infectious Salmon Anaemia. It looks anaemic even when it isn't. Wild salmon, by contrast, is fit, red and lissom, spending two to four years at sea before it reaches adulthood and returns to the fisherman's nets in its home river. You can also get one-year-old nippers called grilse. Wild salmon's fat content is lower, and it has a gamey, healthy texture.
But before you reach for your "natural" credit card, think again. On at least three counts, wild salmon may offend you.
First, wild salmon is not and never will be organic. H Forman & Son, the leading suppliers of wild smoked salmon in Britain, recently asked the Soil Association for approval. It was denied. Since H Forman couldn't say exactly where the salmon had been, or what they'd been eating - the very reasons for favouring it in the first place - the Soil Association couldn't endorse it. As Lance Forman remarks: "Organic salmon is a bit of a nonsense - a marketing tool." You can buy "organic" salmon, at a price, in some supermarkets. The complacently expensive packages do not tell you that the pink blocks have been stuffed with a high-protein diet or that they have taken one-fifth the time to mature of a wild salmon.
"Natural" food lovers are not keen on freezing food. They want everything fresh off the vine, the cow, the river-bed. But all wild salmon is frozen before it is smoked. It is the law to do so - to kill bugs - though it may also improve the quality of the end product. Freezing salmon freezes the water contained in the fish making the fillet more porous and susceptible to the curing process. The flesh becomes velvety and giving.
Last week, I went to a tasting of Forman's wild smoked salmon held at Fortnum and Mason in London. After I'd got over the intimidation of standing in a gilt-edged room stuffed with food mavins and pashminas, I enjoyed myself. The salmon was meaty and delectable, with not a hint of that plastic softness which spoils so many "treat" salmon starters. "London-cured", very mild, with just salt, no sugar, and oak-smoked, we tasted it without lemon, in little curls. How does a lady eat smoked salmon? I wouldn't know. I kept dropping my tea-cup in my eagerness to taste another slice before it all went.
The pashminas listened in hushed approval as Lance told us of his ambition to restore wild smoked salmon to the status of "luxury food". This was language that they understood: money. But then a collective shiver. Lance had mentioned seals. In the world of "natural" food, seals are delightful creatures which should be preserved for wildlife programmes. In the salmon world, though, as Lance vituperated, "seals are vermin". One seal can eat five kilos of fish a day, in great wasteful chunks. The seal protection laws of 1996 forbid it, but Forman's would like to see the seal population of Scotland culled from 100,000 to 30,000. It isn't a very "natural" idea - but then wild salmon is nature red in fin and flesh. That's what makes it wild.
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