Saturday, August 3, 2019

Salmon for a Late-Summer Kitchen

Happy August! It's the last really hot month of the year, so Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Almanack (1976) offers two ways to cook salmon and remain cool-ish.

If you want to be fancy (well, as fancy as this book gets) and serve cold salmon without it being in blox form, or in a weird rice salad mold, or en a gelĂ©e that takes all freaking day, then try simmering Some Handsome Salmon Steaks in spices, vinegar, and citrus juices early in the day, then serving them chilled in the evening.


If this relatively simple recipe still sounds a little too fancy for an I-Hate-to-Cook-Book, Bracken offers a (decidedly downscale) cooking method that will leave the kitchen relatively cool so you can serve the salmon hot:


Well, it's more a story than a recipe, but the takeaway is that a seven-pound salmon well-wrapped in foil with some wine and herbs will cook in the dishwasher in about two cycles. (Just don't add soap!)

I've never had a dishwasher, so I've never been able to experiment with cooking anything in one. If you've got one, now is the time to try it! Everybody needs some weird little summer vacation project before the world cranks back into cold weather (and a super-busy school year for some of us)....

4 comments:

  1. I do have a dishwasher (that I use infrequently because it takes a while for a single person to fill, and I like putting my cold hands in hot water to wash my dishes), but I don't think I'm going to try to poach a salmon in it. That recipe reminds me of the exhaust manifold cookbooks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A dishwasher is just like a steam oven which is getting trendy now! It's also more efficient than traditional oven cooking.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That efficiency would especially have been important in the '70s with the energy crisis.

      Delete