There is a lot to be said about salmon. Their life cycle is so remarkable, and their very survival seems to conjure up metaphors for defiance of adversity: tenacity, audacity, resilience. If anyone wants to personify salmon, their heroic qualities are readily available. We all need to be a little more “salmon-like” to weather life’s up-stream hardships.
Equally heroic are those who are calling urgent attention to what we are doing to the planet and how it is affecting salmon: industrial pollution of river habitats, systematic harvesting of wild fish from the ocean, fish farming and sea lice infestations, climate change. The grim list goes on. In “Salmon: A History of Fish, Planet, and a Shared Destiny,” Mark Kurlansky connects the fate of the fish to the future existence of our world.
Recipe: Black Lime Salmon
“If salmon do not survive, there is little hope for the planet to survive,” he writes with knowledgeable and provocative frankness. Salmon hold up a mirror to both human heroism and arrogance.
But for all that has been written and said, one salmon fact that has always intrigued me is this: Between the time they are born and the time they need to reproduce, many years later, salmon travel many miles from the freshwater rivers where they are born to the salty ocean, and when it’s time to breed, they don’t just return to the refuge of a freshwater river; they return to the same place where they were born.
Take a moment and think about that. All the tributaries and rivers they may have passed through, and all the time that has passed. It’s strange. And a bit mysterious, salmon are thought to have very precise receptors that can detect small differences in the Earth’s magnetic field and use them as homing devices. In conjunction with their magnetic sense, they also use their sense of smell to identify and find the rivers that they were born into.
Good things happen when you combine two star ingredients
— salmon and dried lime — on a plate.
When I opened the oven door to reveal this month’s dish, I was deeply struck by the power of smell and its ability to connect us all, fish or not, to our ancestral homelands. But it wasn’t just the salmon. It was dried Persian lime, which I mixed in and rubbed into the fish before baking. An already distinctive aroma, citrus, musty, tangy and slightly fermented and floral all at the same time, was intensified by the addition of heat. It immediately reminded me of the lemon trees in my mother’s garden, small in fact, but towering large with their intense aroma.
While the salmon may be the star of this dish, it should also be given starring status: dried lime, another culinary expression of citrus that I always talk about.
The joy of cooking with limes dates back to their preparation: they are boiled in salted water and then dried in the sun for several weeks until all the water evaporates, leaving behind an intensely tart and sweet aroma that always reminds me of hard candy.
These little flavourful chunks are the secret ingredient in many dishes. You can add them as is to stews and soups, puncturing them once or twice; you can let them crumble with the contents of the pot, or remove them once the aroma has worn off. Grinding them in a mill with other spices is probably one of my favourite ways to prepare them. For more recipes using this lime, also known as noumi basra, black lime or limoo amani, check out Food of Life by Najmier Batmanglij.“ This is a must-have cookbook.
Once I’ve smeared this mixture on a beautiful salmon fillet, there’s very little else it needs to call this a dinner. Of course, I could add more citrus flavors here, grated some zest, a drizzle of juice, and I could go on about my favorite topic: lemons and limes. But for now, I’m going to inhale the aromas and connect, like the salmon, to the river that calls home.
