The idea of fish-based rillettes had not crossed my path until about a year ago but suddenly the name has been popping up everywhere. Rillettes, as everyone probably knows, is a French classic of shredded meat potted with lard or melted butter. I've only had one Salmon Rillettes, which a friend made a few months back, and though he's a fine cook I have to admit that I didn't find his version successful (and from a comment he made at the time, he didn't either). I have no idea where his recipe/inspiration for his version came from, but such was the dish that I wasn't curious about his source or further adventures in that arena. Salmon rillettes? No thank you.
However, being long on salmon we smoked ourselves a few weeks ago and needing a dish to take to a White Burg tasting one of our groups was doing last night, I decided yesterday that maybe there was a better way to approach it so I went romping around on the internet for recipes.
It only took a minute of scanning Google to realize that the esteemed Thomas Keller of French Laundry and Per Se fame might just be the one responsible for the current popularity of this dish, based on either a dish he serves/served at Bouchon. It's basically salmon, both raw and smoked, sealed in layers in a jar with melted butter.
Which is a problem because Jenise does not like the grainy texture of melted butter once it rehardens. Cold butter straight out of the fridge on a slice of hot, just baked bread? Nirvana. Hot and melted for dipping broiled lobster tail? Great. Melted and rehardened? No.
I discovered this about myself back when I was trying to teach myself to be a sophisticate so that once I finally escaped from Whittier, California, I would fit seamlessly into the chic New York society I craved from afar. Yes, there I would be in my supermodern Manhattan penthouse apartment wearing an elegant off-the-shoulder black slip of a thing, dining on clever little ramekins of potted shrimp with my stylish friends. Why potted shrimp? It was a dish I had seen referred to in some society maven's column the very first time I got my hands on a NY Times--I was maybe 14--and so I quickly went about acquiring a Craig Claibourne cookbook so that I could practice this magical food for my future repertoire.
But I hated the butter part. Nix that!
Other recipes reminded me of the ubiquitous "salmon spreads" from our Alaska years that everybody up there made from the largesse of salmon caught during the too-short summers. Also, coming to mind from the dark ages of my childhood, when my father's new wife, whose recipes all came from ladies magazines and the backs of boxes and cans, made an appie for parties she unceremoniously called "salmon log". It was a popular home-entertaining fad of the time made from canned salmon, liquid smoke and cream cheese rolled in pecans and served with, what else, Ritz crackers. I certainly devoured my share of that back in the day, but for white burgundies I hoped for something a lot more refined.
So, as a binder, butter was out for me. Cream cheese was too evil-stepmothered and mayo too tuna-sandwiched. Olive oil too greasy. So what did that leave me? Sour cream, or cream fraiche.
And I just happened to have some sour cream. Plus, in the garden I had a lot of my favorite fresh herb now that I grow my own, tarragon, and from my friend Annabelle a lot of fresh California lemons. Out of that would come a very edible combination.
Out came the food processor and into it went two pieces of salmon, skin removed and all the dark meat underlayer scraped away, somewhat more than two cups. And a shallot, finely diced. Then maybe a tablespoon of chopped fresh tarragon, an equivalent amount of fresh parsley, the zest of one whole large lemon and the juice of half of it. About then it occurred to me that soft, room temperature butter, NOT melted, could be an elegant base, so I threw the last third of a cube (why do we call them cubes when they're rectangles?) into the mix and started pulsing. A quick taste told me that I hadn't ruined anything, but that loading it with more butter would just be a compound butter as dense as Betty's old Salmon Log and I didn't want to go there. So I added a scoop of sour cream. Pulse pulse. Better, but not there. So in went some more and then more, and finally when the whole carton was in, about 8 ounces, the final touch of an extra squeeze of lemon and a fat pinch of kosher salt to make the lemon sweeter and more umami-bright resulted in something very, very tasty even if, to my tongue, not so compelling a texture. A bit sawdusty and though lighter than Betty's salmon log, only just.
But I was out of tricks and unwilling to add any more fat, so I sighed in resignation and loaded what I'd made into a white wide-V shaped bowl. And realized that all my hard work had culminated in a dead-ringer for a can of Friskie's Mariner's Catch cat food.
Well, that wouldn't do! So I popped the cork on a pale vin gris from Provence and mixed a lightly warmed bit of that with an equal amount of chicken consomme and some powdered gelatin. After a quick freeze of a small amount in a tiny bowl to confirm that the texture of my aspic was right, I smoothed out the top later of my rillettes with an offset spatula, imbedded a 3" tarragon tip onto the surface, poured the gelatin over and parked the bowl in the fridge to set. Very pretty. Very French.
A half hour later, it was packed into the new German-made basket (my new favorite thing and a gift from Ines) with the toasted slices of a whole baguette, a little serving knife and a platter, and on its way to Bellingham. Unchilled.
Two hours would pass before I finally sampled what I had made. And this is important because in that two hours, unexpected magic occurred. That is, where the cold salmon and cold dairy products had previously blended into a fine mixture of dairy suspended between strands of fish, the combination of time and slowly warming up to room temperature created the opportunity for the salmon strands to completely absorb the lightweight sourcream, turning the pasty-colored almost-cat food into lustrous plump shreds, like one of those before and after hair commercials. And in the mouth? Not just different but positively luxurious. I sat there after my first bite, open-mouthed and dumbfounded, thinking "I made THIS?" Oh sure I knew the flavors would knit together, but all the salmon spreads I've had in my life before now did not prepare me for the possibility of something as elegant, as plush, as what I'd inadvertently produced. I've never had anything like it.
What a difference a day makes. Salmon rillettes? Yes, please!
Tis a good thing that you were able to end with a different-looking finished product, or folks might have been questioning your fiscal solvency after that remodel project. 