Viv’s salmon mousse

This mousse is reasonably quick, cheap and easy to make and makes a good standby, with crusty bread, for lunch. As a starter course, it will impress your guests no end - especially if you use some of the enhancements I’ve suggested. It’s been a regular Christmas dinner starter chez Marsden for years.

The original recipe (along with the one for lemon curd) came from one of my favourite people - my ex-sister-in-law (via Wife Number Two), Viv, who was a seriously good cook when I was still a real novice. Viv had - and presumably still has - a machine called a Thermomix - a sort-of combined blender and cooker: you use the blender function to make a purée of almost anything, then turn the speed to low and switch the heat on. It makes delicately-cokked mixtures like lemon curd effortlessy. I never used it, or even saw it in full flight, but I ate a number of the recipes in its instruction book. They were all delicious.

Making sense of silly recipes

The main drawback of this recipe in its original form was the instruction to measure out ten tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise. That was a real pain (try it), so I translated it, based on what was engraved on my largest measuring spoon, to 180ml. That wasn’t much better - you try getting the surface of the mayonnaise in a measuring jug level enough to measure. In the end I weighed five tablespoons of mayonnaise and did a few simple sums. Weighing is much easier. Actually, this quest for precision in the kitchen seems to be a waste of time. Patricia and I bought a set of measuring spoons for her Dad recently. His tablespoon holds 15ml. Mine holds 18. That’s a 20% discrepancy.

Ingredients

• 1 Tbs powdered gelatine. I used to think that this slightly gluey extract of boiled leftovers from the abbatoir was okay for a strongly flavoured recipe like this, but I’m sure you can taste it in the finished mousse, so I prefer to use 6 sheets of the much purer (and much more expensive) leaf gelatine, made from pigskin. According to at least one (presumably authoritative) website, two leaves are equivalent to one teaspoon of the powder. I work on the assumption that this is about how much water the six leaves of gelatine absorb, soak and wring out the leaves as usual and simply leave the water out.
• 3 Tbs cold water.
• 1 Tbs lemon juice. The real thing, freshly-squeezed, is best, but if you must use bottled juice, I find the Sicilia brand (they do good lime juice as well) in nasty little plastic containers excellent. Unfortunately you’ll probably have to go to a French hypermarket to get it.
• One 212 g tin of red salmon (no, I don’t know why they pack it in such silly quantities, either). Red salmon is more expensive - so presumably better - than pink salmon. Salmon and trout aren’t white, like most fish, because the insects and tiny shellfish they feed on contain a substance called astaxanthin; presumably red salmon find more astaxanthin where they live. (I remember hearing that roseate flamingoes get their pink colouring from the crustaceans they eat - but I haven’t got a recipe for flamingo.)
• 150 g mayonnaise (I usually use Sainsbury’s French Mayonnaise).
• 180 ml whipping cream. To save buying this specially, you can make your own from double cream by adding 15% of very cold milk. That’s 15% of the volume of the cream rather than of the finished volume - see The calculator (and other electronic devices) in the kitchen - which actually means the mixture should be 87% cream and 13% whole milk. To save you doing the sums in the middle of making this mousse, make your 180ml whipping cream from 157ml cream and 23ml milk (best to put the milk in a measure and top up to 180ml with the cream).
• Salt (fine sea salt) and a few twists of the pepper mill to season.

Method

1. Oil a mould lightly but thoroughly. I usually use two small oblong aluminium loaf tins and olive oil - but then I rarely use any other oil - wiped round carefully with kitchen roll.
2. Measure the water and lemon juice into a basin that will sit on or in a small saucepan.
3. Sprinkle the powdered gelatine onto the liquid.
4. Leave until the liquid has been completely absorbed by the gelatine.
5. Bring some water to the boil in the saucepan that fits the basin, reduce to a bare simmer and melt the gelatine mixture over it until completely clear.
6. Take the pan off the heat but leave the basin over the hot water to keep it warm.
7. Whip the cream in a large bowl until it forms soft peaks. Don’t overdo the whipping - easy to do with an electric mixer.
8. Empty the contents of the tin of salmon into a blender or food-processor.
9. Add the mayonnaise and blend/process until fairly smooth. (If you have a digital kitchen scale, the easy way to do this (and to save on washing-up) is to put a plate on the scale, stand the blender/processor goblet on top, zero the scale and dollop the mayonnaise straight in from the jar.)
10. Add the gelatine mixture and blend/process until fully combined.
11. Tip and scrape the contents of the blender or processor into the bowl with the cream (if you haven’t got a flexible plastic or rubber bowl-scraper, you should have - buy one before you attempt this recipe).
12. Fold the mixture into the cream. If you haven’t done this before, the idea is to mix gently, using something like a slotted spoon or a palette knife and cutting and folding, until the ingredients are just combined. Its better to leave the mixture a little variegated than to overdo the mixing and break down the whipped cream.
13. Season to taste (literally - dip your finger in and have a lick) with salt and pepper, avoiding too much more stirring.
14. Pour into the oiled moulds and thump them on the worktop a few times to level the mousse and release any air bubbles.
15. Chill in the fridge until really firm - at least a couple of hours.

The mixture will have stuck firmly to the mould around the edge, regardless of oiling, so run a flexible knife round the edge of each mould, trying not to gouge into the mousse. I find the best way to release the mousse is then to lay the loaf tin on each side in turn and thump it firmly on the worktop a few times. When all four sides are free of the tin, the mousse should tip out easily: put your serving plate over the mould, hold them together and invert smartly. Lift the mould a bit. If the mousse doesn’t stay on the plate give the whole assembly a couple of thumps on the worktop.

The mousse should be firm enough to stand up on the plate, slice and eat with a fork but creamy enough to spread on bread or toast if you prefer. Serve in slices at least a centimetre thick, with good bread, a simple salad (watercress is good) and a squeeze of lemon.

You could also serve my fast Sauce Marie Rose (prawn cocktail sauce) which actually goes far better with this robustly-flavoured mousse than it does with the more delicate prawns.

I have made this mousse with left-over fresh salmon. I don’t think the taste was significantly different in view of all the other ingredients.

Jazzing it up

Smoked salmon

The single most spectacular improvement to this mousse is to fold in half a pound of chopped-up smoked salmon. I buy 8 oz vacuum packs of trimmings from my local fishmonger - you need to pick them over carefully for bits of bone, fin, gristle and skin but that’s no hardship: you can chew the meat off these before you discard them, eat one or two of the choicer morsels and have a generally luxurious ten minutes. If this isn’t the origin of the phrase ’fingerlickin’ good’, it ought to be.

Sainsbury’s also sell packets of Scotch smoked salmon trimmings, which are very good. However, since they contain no grotty bits you don’t have to pick them over. Nibble a few pieces anyway.

You need to watch the quality of smoked salmon. We recently bought a sliced side from Norway in a French hypermarket, and it wasn’t a Patch on the Scotch stuff. When it comes to sensational things like smoked salmon (which Wife Number Two thought tasted like raw bacon, for God’s sake) it’s crazy to skimp.

Lemon

The mousse is even better if you add the zest of a lemon. Unwaxed lemons are best (well washed, of course), and since the zest isn’t cooked it needs to be very finely-shredded - a grater will do but a purpose-designed zester is far better. Even then I like to pulverise it thoroughly with a pestle and mortar to break down any leathery bits.

Decoration

Sprinkling the inside of the oiled mould generously with dried dill or sticking feathery fronds of the fresh herb to the oil before pouring in the mousse makes it look more interesting. You can also pour in a layer, sprinkle with dill, pour in another layer, and so on. I guess you could even coat the mould with a thin layer of clear aspic and get really creative with herb leaves if you were desperate to impress someone special...

Mousse Mk II

For our starter on Christmas Day 1997, this recipe underwent another dramatic mutation. I bought a couple of really handsome-looking salmon tail fillets and steamed one very carefully, in a basin to catch the juices, peeping under the lid every half-minute or so and testing gently until I could just separate the flakes. The resulting super-succulent fish (it’s so easy to make salmon dry and uninteresting) and its juice were used instead of tinned salmon to make the mousse. I weighed the cooked fish and its juices on my trusty digital scale, accurate to 5 grams, and used the method described in The calculator (and other electronic devices) in the kitchen to work out the quantities of the other ingredients (if this is too much for your maths, just cook plenty of fish, weigh out 210 grams or so, make the mousse to the recipe above and eat the rest of the salmon separately).

The oiled mould was carefully lined with thinly-sliced smoked salmon (see my comment about quality above).

I then steamed the second fillet just as carefully. As soon as it was cool, I flaked it carefully and put several layers of thinly scattered flakes and feathery fronds of fresh dill, into the lined mould with the mousse. The result, sliced onto a bed of watercress and served with a refined version of Sauce Marie Rose and fresh Italian bread, looked and tasted sensational.

Mousse Mk III - ten years on

For Christmas dinner 2007 I made the mousse with my hot-smoked salmon instead of either tinned or fresh. The result was mild-flavoured but very good with the ubiquitous Sauce Marie Rose and Patricia?s Melba Toast.