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The Meal I’ll Never Have Again
In memory of my dad — and his smoked salmon.
There’s one meal I’ll never repeat.
It was a couple of days before Midsummer, and I was visiting my dad in Finland with my ex-boyfriend. We’d been living in Argentina for two and a half years then.
Dad was a fantastic cook, and he always prepared whatever food we wanted as kids. As adults, whenever I’d visit with my boyfriend, he’d pull out all the stops, preparing us five-course meals with every possible Finnish delicacy. Reindeer with lingonberry jam and garlic potatoes au gratin. Four different types of different fish in five different ways. And my favorite, cold-smoked salmon.
There are two traditional ways of making smoked salmon in Finland, with cold or warm smoke. Warm is easy and cheap to prepare, but cold-smoked is tricky. Getting in that deep flavor without cooking the fish takes time and a lot of detail and checking temperatures. But the reward is worth it: it’s nothing like the smoked salmon you can buy in a store, which is mostly just artificial flavoring.
My dad’s smoked salmon used to take 12 hours to prepare, but that didn’t stop him. The night we spent at his place by the sea, he offered us fish in every possible way. Herring, eel, perch, but the best was the salmon.
