Smoked fish

Wind-drying is the most ancient and basic way of preserving fish. Add the discovery of fire, and early humans might have found that fish hung up over a fire dried more quickly, and that, if the fire was smoky, fish would acquire a different flavor and keep better.

As Sue Shephard (2000) points out, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of what was evidently a substantial fish-smoking "factory" in Poland, dating back to the seventh century. And it is clear that European use of the technique was greatly expanded, perhaps mainly in order to deal with gluts of herring, in the medieval period.

Smoke is highly complex, having a couple of hundred or more constituents. So what it does to fish is also complex, but can be summarized by saying that it deposits on the fish various phenols, aldehydes, tars, etc. and that the combined effect of some of these, which have bactericidal properties, is to make the fish keep noticeably better.

In modern times progress has been made in the construction of special ovens for smoking fish; in analyzing the constituents of smoke which are responsible for changes of flavor; in the choice of wood shavings or chips whose smoke produces the best results; and in elaborating the techniques of both hot and cold smoking.

Hot smoking was developed in northern Europe in medieval times. In this process the smoke temperature is very high and the fish is wholly or partly cooked by being smoked. Herring which were hot smoked on the northern coast of Germany were known as Bucklinge, which became "buckling" in English, but the process was also used for many other species of fish. The hot smoking of fish is also common in Africa. For example, a kind of shad is hot smoked in Ghana in primitive kilns made from oil drums. Hot smoked fish is succulent and tasty but in general does not travel or keep as well as cold smoked. Cold smoking, on the other hand, is not a cooking process; it consists simply in hanging fish in smoke (which may of course be slightly warm, but that is irrelevant), and the result keeps well.

As for the choice of combustible, the traditional preference in Britain was for oak, with ash as second choice and peat being used until recently in Scotland, especially for domestic in their kitchen. In Russia, the woods used have included alder, oak, poplar, and lime. Wood from coniferous trees has also been used, but imparts a resinous flavor. In modern times, the best known smoked fish is smoked salmon, now prepared in many countries and figuring on innumerable restaurant menus around the world. Many of the salmon which are smoked are farmed salmon, but the proportion of farmed to wild varies greatly. In North America more than half of the smoked salmon are farmed, most coming from British Columbia, but even so smoked wild salmon is much easier to obtain there than in Europe.

(By Bill Keystone)

Exercise 2. Answer the questions to the text:

1. What is the most ancient and basic way of preserving fish?

2. When and where was the first fish-smoking "factory" found?

3. What does usually smoke consist of?

4. What has progress been made in recently?

5. What is buckling?

6. Why is hot smoked fish so popular with consumers?

7. What is the choice of combustible? Why?

8. What is the best known smoked fish nowadays?

9. What salmon is more often smoked: farmed or wild?

Exercise 3. Read the text once without using a dictionary.