There’s the old saying that nothing looks better than a ten-day-old tattoo and nothing looks worse than a ten-year-old tattoo. You could say something similar about the taste of salmon, but you’re dealing with much shorter time frames. When one of these fish first comes out of the water, there’s really nothing that can beat it. When my brothers and I stay at our shack in Alaska, we now and then catch king salmon while we’re targeting halibut. We’ll take the fish home, still flopping, and slice a fillet into pieces no thicker than a business card. We’ll fill a big bowl with an inch of soy sauce and a generous squeeze of tubed wasabi and sit around until there’s not a scrap left. While it’s sometimes hard to justify the purchase of a cabin that you visit only once or twice a year, one of these meals goes a long way toward an adequate explanation.
Too bad that the taste of fresh fish doesn’t last. In fact, you can watch the quality of a freshly caught salmon deteriorate right before your eyes. Flop one into your canoe on a hot, sunny day and it begins to spoil within minutes. At first when you poke a finger into the fish’s side, the skin bounces back like it would if you pressed a baby’s cheek. Moments later when you do the same thing the skin stays dimpled, as if the fish has somehow become a tad deflated. The eye goes cloudy before you can paddle all the way across the cove. You fillet the salmon out and the flesh is still beautiful, but the suggestion of decay is already haunting you. Suddenly you realize that the black bears you were watching earlier had it figured out: Eat the fish as soon as it’s caught, and all the better if it’s still in the water.
I feel a little bad for people who have never eaten a salmon within hours of its being caught. More and more, the salmon you get in restaurants is just an approximation of the real thing. A few years ago I was fishing in Chile with my wife and we spent a little time near one of those depressing salmon farms that have proliferated along its remote southern coast. The water inside the nets seemed to simmer from all the activity of the captive Atlantic salmon, especially when the guys came by to scatter loads of pelletized feed. Nearby was a house-sized rock where the sea lions liked to haul out and bask. The rock was stained a weird shade of red. When I asked about it, I was told that the sea lions prey heavily on salmon that escape from the pens. The rock’s color was from the artificial dye that is fed to farm-raised salmon in order to give them a natural-looking wild color. Put simply, the sea lions had shit out enough dye to paint a house. I imagined those fish getting distributed around the world, particularly in the United States, and the thought of all those people eating phony trash made me want to either cry or laugh. (Next time you’re in a grocery store, you’ll notice that farmed salmon actually has an ingredients list.)
Of course, the allure of fake salmon is that you can get it fresh year-round. No waiting for the annual spawning runs, no struggling to preserve large catches for consumption during the long off-season. But in all honesty I’d rather eat rotten salmon that I caught myself in the wild than farm-raised salmon that were reared on dyed cat food in some faraway cage. Not that I’m actually faced with that choice. Over the millennia, humans have come up with all kinds of ways of preserving the annual bounty of salmon in order to hold it over for lean times. My mom used to take the salmon we caught in the Great Lakes region and pressure-seal it in glass Mason jars. Sometimes she’d also put mustard in the jars, or just salt and pepper. The bones would dissolve in the heat. She’d line these jars on the canning shelves in the basement and we’d use the meat to make salmon patties that were mushy and wet but not altogether bad.
My brother Danny, who lives in Alaska, harvests sockeye salmon in the summer from the Kenai, Copper, or Kasilof rivers. He catches the fish with a dip net, and his usual legal allowance is twenty-five salmon for the head of the household and an additional ten fish per each household member. He can fillet salmon faster than anyone I’ve ever met who’s not a commercial fish processor. He eats his fair share of fresh fillets, but a big haul of fish means preserving some as well. You can always try to wrap the fillets and freeze them, but that only leads to disappointment. When you thaw them a few months later, they still look like fresh salmon and you can’t help but get your hopes up. Then you cook a fillet and taste it and realize that the fish has already started to turn into something not so delightful. Rotten isn’t quite the right word. Skanky is more like it.
A few years ago, Danny bought a sealer that handles metal cans. He can produce tins of salmon that almost look like something you’d buy from a store—though his tins are a weird army-green color that gives them a sort of postapocalyptic survivalist feel. Other fillets he smokes in a large plywood fish smoker that’s powered by a hot plate. Those smoked fillets get vacuum-sealed into plastic bags or else pressure-cooked in glass jars. He does the jarred fish “dry,” meaning there’s no liquid in there, just glossy, lopsided cubes of smoked fish stacked in a jumble inside a glass jar. He sends a couple to my wife and me every Christmas and we treat them more like decorations than food. I open one only when we have interesting friends for dinner. Invariably they say something along the lines of “What the hell’s that?” Shortly after, they say something along the lines of “Damn, that’s good.”
And I answer: “You should taste one of those things when it’s still flopping.”