Scottish Smoked Salmon: Wild Rivers, Fish Farms and Controversy

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Export values and production figures change yearly and are reported by industry and government. The causes of wild salmon decline are complex and debated, with farming one factor among several, including climate change and conditions at sea. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) is used for the natural history of the salmon, the history of smoking and the arguments about aquaculture as they stood in 2014; it is not used for current production or regulatory facts.

Wild salmon

established Atlantic salmon return from the sea to spawn in the rivers where they hatched. Scotland's rivers have been famous for salmon for centuries, and salmon fishing rights are a valuable form of property in Scots law. Salted and pickled salmon were exported to England and Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. Salmon fishing with rod and line became a prestigious sport in the nineteenth century.

established The life cycle. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) sets out the life of the Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, whose range once ran from Portugal to Norway and across by Greenland to North America. The eggs are laid in the gravel of a cold stream. The tiny alevins that hatch become fry, then parr, and stay in fresh water until they go down to the sea as smolts, changed to suit salt water. Some return to their home river after a single year at sea; these are grilse. Most spend two to four years at sea and come back as full-grown salmon of 80 to 100 centimetres. They are caught on the way upriver, by nets at the river mouths and by rod and line upstream. After spawning they are "spent", thin and of little value, and many die. How salmon find their way back to their native rivers was, the Companion notes, still not fully understood.

established Pressures on the wild fish. The Companion records that salmon were not caught at sea in the past because no one knew where they fed. Once feeding grounds were found, for example off Greenland, a sea fishery followed, and with it controversy. But in its view the harm done by sea fishing was small compared with the damage from polluted or blocked rivers, which over two centuries had removed the salmon from many places where it had once been plentiful.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), names the Tay, Spey, Tweed, Don and Dee among the rivers that produced salmon "of superlative quality" and in great quantity. She quotes the Spanish envoy Pedro de Ayala, who in 1498 remarked on the salmon, herring and stockfish Scotland exported. Salmon was common enough to be cheap. Edmund Burt (1730) tells of a Highland gentleman in London who ordered beefsteak for himself and, as a joke, salmon for his servant Duncan; the servant's bill came to nearly as many shillings as his master's did pence. Fresh in summer and kippered in winter, salmon was as important to people near the salmon rivers as herring and haddock were on the coast, McNeill writes.

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), takes the trade further back. Salmon, she writes, was marked early as a natural resource for export, and curing it by smoking or pickling was an important industry as early as the thirteenth century, carrying on even in the worst years of war with England. That is her summary rather than a cited record. The period sources she quotes are more specific. John Taylor, the "Water Poet", found "fresh salmon" among the venison and game at the Earl of Mar's hunting camp in 1618. Daniel Defoe, in his Tour (1724–26), saw at Kirkcudbright "an extraordinary salmon fishing" where the salmon "come and offer themselves, and go again", because the town was too poor to build boats, buy nets or cure the catch. By the end of the eighteenth century, Hope records, Kirkcudbright had three salmon fisheries, each let for about £400 a year. They used the haaf net, a framed net held by men standing in the tide at the river mouth, and sent their fish to Manchester, Liverpool, Whitehaven and London.

established Salmon was also breakfast fare for visitors. The poet Robert Southey, touring in 1819, was offered broiled salmon from the Spey with potted and fresh butter, honey and preserved gooseberries, as quoted by Hope. By the early 1900s, she writes, disease and overfishing had already turned salmon into a food for the rich.

shared McNeill also repeats two famous claims. One is that farm servants, when hired, stipulated that they should not be given salmon more than a set number of times a week. This story is told of many rivers in Britain, and no written agreement containing such a clause has been traced; it should be treated as traditional. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) tells the same story of apprentices in the north of England and notes that the French historian Madeleine Ferrières has shown the French versions of it to be culinary mythology; the Companion advises the same scepticism about the British ones. The nearest thing to evidence is a memoir. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, recalling Perthshire gentry life in the earlier eighteenth century, wrote that salmon, "which is now a luxury, was then cheap and plentiful, being in the summer months the chief food of the servants", as quoted by Annette Hope in A Caledonian Feast (1987). That supports the plenty behind the story, but it is a recollection of diet, not a contract limiting it. The other is that an Act of 1431, under James I, required half the price of salmon exported to France to be paid in Gascon wine. McNeill gives no reference, so it is reported here as her claim.

established By her second edition McNeill was already lamenting decline: the rivers were "greatly over-fished", much of the catch went to southern markets, and the only salmon the old farm workers now tasted came from tins.

Smoking salmon

shared Smoking fish was a long-standing way of preserving it. Modern cold-smoked salmon, thinly sliced, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Smokehouses in London's East End, established by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, played a key role, using Scottish salmon. Scottish smokehouses developed their own traditions, often using oak chips, including whisky-barrel oak.

established Scotland's own smoked salmon is much older than the London trade, though it was a different product. McNeill notes that kippered salmon is mentioned in the household book of James V (1513–42). In Susan Ferrier's novel Marriage (1818) the gourmand Dr Redgill praises Perthshire's "Tay salmon, kippered, crisp and juicy". Scott, in Guy Mannering, describes fish dried in the turf smoke of Highland cabins as a winter relish with potatoes and onions. Osgood Mackenzie's A Hundred Years in the Highlands, quoted by McNeill, recalls the family cook Kate Archy, who judged the exact amounts of salt, sugar and smoke for each salmon and grilse according to whether it was to be eaten at once or kept. These kippered fish were salted and smoked harder, for keeping, than the mild, thinly sliced smoked salmon of the twentieth century. The journalist Ian Macpherson, recalling his grandmother's house in the Central Highlands, where she might lodge thirty drovers in a night, listed "salmon, kippered for the winter" beside braxy mutton, salt herring and oatcakes, as quoted by Annette Hope in A Caledonian Feast (1987).

shared The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) takes "kippered salmon" back to the fifteenth century, earlier than the James V reference, but warns that the early mentions are hard to read. A "kipper" was also a spent salmon, one that had spawned and survived in poor condition. The Companion, following C. L. Cutting's Fish Saving (1955), suggests that such fish were made saleable by curing and that the cure took its name from them. The name later passed to the split smoked herring.

established The Companion confirms the contrast between old and new. Salmon, it says, was a common fish from early times until the nineteenth century, especially in Scotland, and it was smoked; but the result was a salty, hard product, not like modern smoked salmon, which is tender, slightly moist and usually mild. The flavour still depends on the wood, and it can be strong. The Companion notes a clear difference between today's lighter London cure and the Scottish cure, without spelling out the difference in detail.

established Wood and smoke. The Companion's entry on smoking records that hardwoods are best for smoking and that oak is the preferred wood in Britain, with beech and birch also good. Softwoods give a bitter, resinous taste, though a little may be added for colour, and a small amount of an aromatic wood such as apple, rosemary or juniper may be added near the end for a special flavour. This matches the juniper that McNeill's connoisseurs favoured. Smoking fish in Europe is very old: the Companion cites a drying and smoking site by the River Bann in Ireland dated to about 2000 BC.

established McNeill gives a home method, which she labels modern, from the naturalist Mortimer Batten. The salmon is halved, boned and buried in herring salt for a day, then oiled, wiped with a cloth soaked in rum or whisky, buried in Demerara sugar, oiled again and smoked in a kiln over peat, oak chips and oak sawdust on two successive evenings. Some connoisseurs, she adds, held that a little juniper wood gave a delicate flavour. Batten advised slicing it "tissue-thin", while a Scotsman food writer of 1959 preferred "not-too-thin slices" with lemon and red pepper. Meg Dods (1826) recommended the bone cut from a kippered salmon, left with rough pickings on it, broiled and buttered for breakfast.

established Fresh salmon had its own rituals. McNeill quotes Scott's note to St Ronan's Well on the "kettle of fish", a riverside party at which salmon was boiled in brine as soon as it was caught. She also prints the Edinburgh "Tweed kettle", a salmon hash sold all day in a Broughton Street eating-house in the mid-nineteenth century.

established Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), calls the Tweed kettle an early "takeaway" from the Edinburgh cookshops, usually simmered with white wine, mushrooms, shallots and herbs. She sets beside it the angler Thomas Tod Stoddart's own version, printed at the end of The Angler's Companion (1847). Stoddart crimped the fish by the waterside as soon as it was killed, slashing it slantwise every two inches, and bled it by holding it in the stream. Cut into slices, it went into fast-boiling spring water with "a large bowlful of kitchen salt", and boiled for ten minutes if under nine pounds, with a minute more for each extra pound. It was served hot with its brine. "This is salmon to perfection", he wrote, "the veritable kettle of Tweedside". Hope notes that the method breaks the usual rule of gentle poaching, though the salt raises the water's boiling point.

Farming

established Salmon farming began in Scotland around 1969, with a farm at Lochailort in the west Highlands. Fish are raised in freshwater hatcheries and then grown in floating net pens in sea lochs. The industry expanded rapidly and became a major employer in remote coastal communities. Farmed salmon is now one of the UK's most valuable food exports.

established In its entry on aquaculture, The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014), by its editor Tom Jaine, places Scottish salmon farming in a long history. Fish have been kept and fattened in ponds since early China and ancient Rome; medieval monasteries and Georgian country houses had stewponds; and mussels and oysters were being cultivated well before 1900. Modern aquaculture is different in scale, and salmon and tropical prawns are its two most important species. Jaine mentions "controlled pens for salmon in Scotland" alongside Norway's fjord farms, and notes that halibut and turbot were beginning to be farmed in Scotland too.

established A snapshot from 1986. Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), gives a view of the industry in its first growth. Fish farming was then Scotland's fastest-growing agricultural industry, with more than 100 companies at 210 freshwater and sea sites. In 1986 they produced about 10,000 tons of salmon worth around £42 million. Many were small family businesses which met high standards to qualify for aid from the Highlands and Islands Development Board. These are her 1987 figures; current production is many times larger and should be taken from official statistics.

shared Hope's own hopes for farming were part of the debate of the time. She reported connoisseurs' view that farmed fish differed from wild only by a "hardly detectable matter of texture", though elsewhere she found river salmon stronger in flavour. She hoped a steady, reasonably priced supply would discourage commercial poaching, which by the 1980s used dynamite and monofilament gill nets set up to two miles long outside the legal nets. Gill nets, she notes, had once been legal gear but were banned because the fish died slowly and bruised in them and breeding stock of every size was caught.

Quality marks

established In 1992 Scottish farmed salmon became the first non-French food to receive the Label Rouge quality mark, and in 2004 Scottish Farmed Salmon gained Protected Geographical Indication status.

Controversy

established Salmon farming has faced persistent criticism. Sea lice, parasites that thrive in dense fish farms, can spread to wild salmon and sea trout. Disease and high mortality rates have led to millions of farmed fish dying. Escaped farm fish may breed with wild salmon. Waste and chemicals affect the seabed. In 2018 a Scottish Parliament committee concluded that the status quo was not an option. Meanwhile, wild salmon catches in Scotland have fallen to historic lows.

shared Jaine's entry in The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) sets out the argument as it stood in 2014. Supporters see aquaculture as the answer to a growing population, rising demand for fish and falling wild stocks. Critics reply that the damage is unsustainable: wild fish such as sand eels are caught and boiled down for feed, so the farms add to the overfishing they were meant to replace; feed production can leave chemical residues in farmed flesh; escapees interbreed with wild fish to their disadvantage; and disease and parasites spread from farms into the wild. Jaine observed that these problems were not halting the industry's growth. The Companion's salmon entry adds that cheap farmed salmon has become plentiful, and that fish from inferior farms tend to be fatty and less flavourful. The later Scottish evidence summarised above should take precedence over these 2014 summaries on any point of fact.

• Scotland's first commercial salmon farm opened around 1969.
• Scottish salmon was the first non-French product to receive Label Rouge.
• London's East End smokehouses helped create modern smoked salmon.
• Salmon fishing rights are a form of property in Scots law.
• Wild salmon numbers in Scotland are at historic lows.
• Kippered salmon was served in the household of James V in the early sixteenth century.
• A Scottish "kettle of fish" was a riverside party where freshly caught salmon was boiled in brine.
• One old home cure rubbed the salmon with rum or whisky between salting and sugaring.
• A salmon that returns from the sea after only one year is called a grilse.
• "Kipper" was once a name for a spent salmon that had survived spawning.
• Oak is the favourite smoking wood in Britain; a little juniper was prized for flavour.
• Scottish fish farms have also tried halibut and turbot.
• In 1986 Scotland's fish farms produced about 10,000 tons of salmon.
• Stoddart's "kettle of Tweedside" boiled the salmon hard in heavily salted water and served it with the brine.

• Myth: Scottish smoked salmon is wild salmon. Most is farmed. Wild salmon is now rare and expensive, and wild salmon numbers in Scotland have fallen to historically low levels.
• Disputed: What caused the decline of wild salmon. Salmon farming has been criticised for sea lice, disease, escapes and pollution, but the causes of the decline are complex and debated. Farming is one factor among several, including climate change and conditions at sea, and The Oxford Companion to Food judges polluted or blocked rivers to have done far more harm than sea fishing.
• Myth: Smoked salmon came to Scotland from London. Scots were kippering salmon centuries earlier, with a record in the household book of James V (1513–42). That older cure was harder and saltier, and the modern mild, thinly sliced style owes much to London's East End smokehouses.
• Myth: Servants insisted on being given salmon no more than twice a week. The story is told of many rivers, and no written agreement with such a clause has been traced. The Companion notes that French versions have been shown to be culinary mythology. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre's memoir shows only that salmon was plentiful and cheap.
• Disputed: The Act of 1431 requiring half the price of salmon exported to France to be paid in Gascon wine. F. Marian McNeill gives no reference for it.
• Disputed: Whether Scottish or wild smoked salmon is best. The Companion's view that smoked salmon is "perhaps at its best" when made in Scotland or Ireland from wild fish is a judgement of taste, not a finding.