Of Salmons and Steinways
getting along swimmety-swimmingly
If I’d known in Week 2 what I know in Eeek 10 the first half of this course would have gone a whole heck of a lot better. Now - finally - I feel like I’m swimming along, getting shit done, and generally cooking with gas as we like to say in our house.
That was a typo and I left it in because it seems appropriate for the moment. The angst-o-meter ramped up this week with practical exam menu delivery and also the damn-I-have-to-leave-I-can’t-wait-to-get-home teeter totter is fully in play. So there were all manner of activities this week but I got through them! I even relinquished control - briefly - and let someone else drive on an excursion at one point. Who even am I anymore? Must be another growth spurt!
First, of course, the cooking. I was in Kitchen 1, with the most excellent Chef Tiffin all week.1
On the menu:
hot smoked salmon in a salad with beets and watercress and horseradish cream and goddamn that salmon - organic - was exquisite
raspberry jellies with fresh mint cream which were like the most sublime raspberry jello ever but better
smoked butter that was a fail not from the smoking but apparently because it was the WRONG CREAM Grommit! Not my fault, I made it with what I was given but apparently I made savory smoked buttercream, not butter. Do not really recommend.
a really fantastically gorgeous pork roast because you can’t get pork like that in the US
more cucumber pickle this time with fennel, absolutely living on pickles rn
pounds of a delicious potato salad2
a frankly underwhelming mushroom and caramelized onion “salad” - I don’t really even know what it was but apparently I seasoned it well
a sourdough loaf that went missing and may have ended up at Ballymaloe House for dinner?
caramel ice cream with chocolate sauce and caramel popcorn except that the ice cream of course wasn’t ready and had to be tasted the next day while the chocolate sauce and caramel popcorn were tasted the same day as my . . .
char-grilled squid with chili-parsley oil! They were all delicious, and my squid had a little surprise for me
duck legs with thyme and onions - so easy, so good, must make again and again
a red lentil dal with tamarind relish that was surprisingly delicious
more puff pastry because IT IS ALWAYS PUFF PASTRY WEEK
a miniature gâteau pithivier that was awesome until I left in a nanosecond too long on the glazing step and it required emergency surgery to remove the char
practiced the cheese galette for my practical exam
practiced brown soda bread for my practical exam and nailed it
another sourdough that better not go walkabout this time, Jane3
It was kind of a case of just putting my head down and go. Chef Tiffin said I was rolling this week, getting a lot done, very impressed etc. “Must be Boston, just putting your head down and getting it done, right?” I don’t know about that because Cambridge but you all know I love that dirty water so won’t split that hair.
We also had our last wine class with five wines tasted before lunch and an introduction to the world of sherry which does not include your grandmother’s Bristol Cream and in which I am contemplating becoming an expert because apparently the very wide range of actually good sherries pair well with all kinds of food.4 Also - finally - learned where the term claret comes from and why it is still in use. It originally referred to a light red wine from Bordeaux - “clairet” - that was about 9% alcohol, and the Brits still use the term for any red from Bordeaux. But here’s the thing: you mostly can’t get claret that isn’t more like 14 or 15% alcohol nowadays because hotter climate → more sugar in the grapes → more alcohol in the wine. T’anks for not’in’, climate change!
That afternoon there was a foraging walk around the grounds with Rory, where we learned more about flavoring creams with various wildflowers and that dahlias were originally grown for their tubers and that you can basically put the leaves of most trees in a salad when they are very young and fresh.5 THEN we all trooped over to the House for a tour and tea. Their peaches are about a week from what the head gardener calls “shooting season” because people are always trying to steal them.
Wednesday was really peak Ballymaloe but then I went to row and nearly lost my head as our cox took us under some bridges when the tide was so high we had to lie down to slide under.6 😬 Monique who had the seat in front of me is still talking about it.
Moving on . . . Thursday, a group of us visited Hederman’s, the premier fish smoker possibly in the world for a private tour and tasting and to meet the sui generis Frank Hederman, a man of supreme fish-smoking talent and strong opinions about pretty much everything.
Our Queen Sarah7 arranged the event and let me tell you, that was 27 euro well-spent. Frank’s wife Caroline met us and handed out health questionnaires and PPE consisting of white paper coats and bright blue hairnets which immediately reduced everyone to fits of giggles and picture taking. The irony is that there wasn’t any smoking going on that day because the wind was blowing from the northwest so we’re all standing there looking like health inspectors while Frank just wanders around looking for all the world like he’s touring the south of France or something in his natty scarf and hat.
Here’s the takeaway: the state of wild salmon in Ireland is dire and it is all the fucking fascist’s8 fault because they a) think that tourists who come to fish the wild salmon will do more for the national economy than the honest god-fearing fishing families working at the jobs they’ve done for decades and b) because they have to be Best Boy in the EU and do everything more than anyone else and that means applying the same standards to small artisanal producers as they do to giant mega-factories.
This doesn’t sit well with Frank, and he is going to let you know. And while his view may be a bit, um, essentialized?, there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
Frank started smoking fish in his early 20s, and he’s now well into his 60s, I’m guessing. Once he figured out the whole smokehouse setup, he would get hundreds of fish a day, not all the wild salmon but a lot. Nowadays, the twelve families that fish for wild salmon in Cork Harbor - are only permitted to catch up to 612 wild salmon PER YEAR BETWEEN THEM. So that’s a problem, and Frank estimates that there will be no more commercial fishing for wild salmon in Ireland within three or four years.9 See above re: the FFs.
About the fish - they are beauties, big and silvery, and Frank had a few boxes to show us but also Dermot showed up with his catch - 10! - so we got to see them as well. The fish are from Cork Harbor because it is the delta for several rivers so the fish swimmety swim (I swear to god he said swimmety swim) through there to go upriver to spawn. You know a male because their coloration gets brighter and their jaws get longer and toothier during their upriver migration so they can protect their mate and her little gravel patch. Sometimes a seal might take a monch out of a salmon’s tail, maybe they are also fascists, and sometimes you’ll see a little hole where some scientist fella has taken a tab to learn about natal rivers. The fishermen might get 35 euro/kilo for the fish, but the smoker will only get about 50% yield from a fish, so you start to understand where the costs start to add up and why Frank’s cold-smoked wild salmon is almost 70 euro/kilo.
The beleaguered fishermen use something called a draft net which is not the mostly-banned drift net but is still a net. They stand in the water or are in a boat with the net and have to be seen to move it every 20 minutes so they don’t, I don’t know, somehow get more fish than they are supposed to? Or drift instead of drafting? Frank says the FFs use drones to keep an eye on the fishermen. Also the seals come for lunch when the fishermen are out so sometimes the fishermen have to deal with them as well.10
Oh, also the fish get lice! Which is at first funny because fish don’t have hair but not that kind of lice. Also not the thing called sea lice that people get which is actually jellyfish larvae that cause a dermatitis known quaintly as “seabather’s eruption.” Sea lice are actually a little parasite that feeds on fishes and causes a big ol’ problem for salmon fisheries although they can actually help tell you how fresh your fish is because different parts of the louse die at different times so depending on what is left stuck to the fish, that’s how long it has been out of the water. They are kind of weird looking and mostly a problem in fish farms but if there is an outbreak and they escape all hell can break loose. Apparently there have been efforts to get rid of them with chemical lice-icides but then that’s a problem because the chemicals are then swimming all around the fish and then the tree huggers (more eyebrows and derisive tone) get involved somehow and this was a problem which I don’t understand because you’d think it was good that they wanted to get rid of the chemicals around the fish? And it is a fish farm thing which Frank mostly does not deal with?
It was hard to keep up with Frank at times.11
When the fish come in they’re weighed and tagged and noted and noted again because there is a whole day of paperwork that needs to be done nowadays because the FFs think it is better if you spend one day a week doing paperwork rather than actually working. But if you are allowed to work, the fish are eviscerated and filleted and just as we are all thinking oh we know how to fillet a fish, Frank tells us that in his prime he could fillet 64 salmon AN HOUR and we are chastened. But that’s nothing he tells us, because the herring girls - women who would follow the herring catches and provide the labor to gut and fillet the fish could do 40 or 50 a MINUTE. Back in the day, of course, before things got mechanized etc.
Frank is a great storyteller but the herring girls were gutting ‘em, not also filleting them. Which actually makes Frank’s 64 fish an hour even more impressive.
There is a wall rack with many knives, the handles color-coded by task, which Frank tells us the FFs said they should have one knife per employee. He is particularly proud of his little S hooks12 on which the fish hang in the smoker and tells of the early days going into his local hardware store and asking for some steel wire to make them and the hardware guy, once it was determined he was smoking fish, commenting that he’d thought Frank was smoking something else the way he was singing and carrying on that morning.
Honestly, I was a little exhausted by the end of this.
Anyway, smoked fish is really simple: it is literally just fish, salt, smoke, and time. The fillets are laid on tables and salted, the salt is washed off, and they’re hung for a bit (outside in the summer if there are no fascists around) and then they’re smoked. That’s it! The oil molecules in the fish flesh absorb the smoke and that’s how they are preserved. The salt tans the skin, and the resistance of the flesh determines when it is done. But of course the art comes in knowing how much salt, and for how long, and that they should be hung to be smoked, not laid on a rack with the smoke rolling over them, and smoked with chips not sawdust and German beech not Irish oak and for how long and so on. It is experience and knowledge, which is what Frank and his staff have and the FFs don’t. You just can’t get that in a factory of thousands where people change jobs every two weeks.
Frank Hederman is what we in the history biz would call a lumper, not a splitter.
We smell some beech chips and agree that they are lovely, and he shows us the sanctum sanctorum where the fish is smoked as well as his big ol’ hot smoker that when they got it had all manner of gauges and gubbins on it and they took ‘em all of and his dad (?) wanted to put a window in the door so they could see when the fish was done and Frank was like, you can just open the door? They never clean the hot smoker because it’s heating up every day, what do you need to clean?
Finally we get to peel off the PPE and go have a taste and while I’ve been eating Hederman’s salmon since I got to Ireland, it does taste particularly fine when sliced properly and at the right temperature and accompanied by Frank’s tale of sending the salmon to England for the Queen’s 80th birthday and how he had to talk them through the slicing of it. Hot tip: you should never buy pre-sliced salmon. You wouldn’t buy sliced cheese, would you?
R.W. Apple Jr. wrote in the NYT in 2000, “Mr. Hederman smokes fish which is a little like saying Steinway makes pianos.” And has an awful lot to say about it too.
ANYWAY. The other reason I was exhausted by Thursday night is that our practical exam menus were due that morning. Teacher Pam sat in her throne I mean at a table in the hall, we peons approached one by one and she scanned each menu and its ingredients while keeping up a running commentary “thank you good galette mussels good butter puff pastry excellent good rhubarb gin I’ll be there for that delicious splendid next.”
whoomp here it is
Shoutout to Bill who took my very specific wine questions to the faculty at the Wine and Cheese Cask and came back with three recommendations that so impressed wine teacher Colm, he immediately followed the Cask online.
Yawn. I keep thinking I should make these shorter but honestly with a subject like Frank Hederman, what’s a girl to do? Tune in next time for tales of celly szn and cooking praccy.13
He’s a teacher here, but his instagram handle is cheftiffin so that is what we call him.
Had a lovely chat with Chef Tiffin about my mom’s potato salad book and moment - he said when tasting, what would mom say? More salt! Also, have to say she should have had this recipe, it was really all that and a bag of chips.
but goddamnit it did!
It was suggested that we pour a little PX over homemade vanilla ice cream and we will swoon.
Also he promised to give us his list of back garden essentials and I do not want to leave Ireland without that!
The Michael Collins Bridge at high tide, not my pic. Not quite this high when we slid under but honestly not far off!
Sarah from Cork worked in The Glass Curtain before coming here, and knows everyone in food in Cork. She is also classically Irish pretty with red curly hair, and in fact nice and has been offered one of the mysterious yet coveted post-program jobs at the school.
I think he may have started out referring to it as the government or the powers that be or something like that, albeit archly, with a pause, an eye roll, and a look around the group as if to say you all know what I mean. But that soon devolved to the fascists and then the fucking fascists. FFs from here on out.
Commercial fishing for wild salmon was banned in southern Norway just this week! So Frank is also smoking organically farmed salmon which live in vastly roomier conditions than their non-organically farmed counterparts and if the fish we’ve had here at Ballymaloe are any indication, vastly more delicious as well.
Check out this video of a seal de-railing the day’s fishing, also it features Shandon Boat Club!
My thumbs were ready to fall off by the end of this. And just to be really pedantic, I think he is using “fascist” incorrectly. The autocratic part, ok I get that, but the generally-associated-with-far-right-politics and extreme nationalism and suppression of opposition? I mean, there he is banging on about them, he’s not in jail or anything so clearly they are not actual Fascists! You can find a lot about fascism on the interwebs but you know I support wikipedia so start with them if you want to learn more.
the actual tenterhook! So if you are on tenterhooks you are a hanging filet awaiting the smoker.
goddamnit i miss hockey
Why can't you get pork like that in the US? What's the difference?
Buying smoked salmon will never be what it was before meeting Frank, through you! And I love the Cambridge meets Ballymaloe moment facilitated by Bill. Brava!