Salmon Paste Sandwich

Open the jar and the salmon paste is a smooth, even pink, the colour of tinned salmon beaten with butter until no grain of fish is left standing. It spreads like soft icing, takes a knife with no resistance, and goes onto buttered white bread in a thin pink film. That smoothness is the whole identity of the made sandwich: where a flaked-salmon filling reads as fish you can see, the paste reads as a flavour with no shape, a pink that tastes of salmon and oil and a faint sweetness and offers the tooth nothing to catch on. It is the salmon sandwich rendered down to a spread.

How much you use is set by how strong the jar is. A spread built to sit sealed for months is concentrated and salted until a thin pass already fills the mouth, so the knife lays down the barest pink film and stops. Spread it thick to be generous and the salt climbs over the salmon and the whole slice turns to one cloying note. Spread it too thin and the bread shows through and the bite is mostly flour. The right amount is a film you can almost see the bread through, even and edge to edge, and the discipline is in resisting the urge to load it.

Butter underneath is the move that makes a thin film work. Laid on the bread before the paste, soft butter gives the spread a surface to grip and pulls its pink evenly across the slice so it does not drag into a streak with bare crumb on either side. The paste carries flavour and no body at all, having been beaten past any flake, so a soft slice is the only honest match, because a chewy or seeded loaf would meet a filling with nothing to push back and turn the sandwich into bread you have to chew through. Cut into triangles, pressed gently, it sits happily for hours in a tin, the film bonded to the butter rather than weeping out.

The smell off the jar is gentle, a soft tinned-fish sweetness with a buttery edge, nothing like the bright sting of fresh salmon. The bite is all softness: white crumb yielding into butter into the slick pink film with no transition between them, the texture uniform from first contact to swallow. The flavour is mild and rounded and a little sweet, salmon at a low even register with the salt sitting just behind it, and it fades cleanly with no aftertaste to speak of. Nothing crunches, nothing is cold, nothing surprises. It is a quiet, smooth, faintly pink mouthful built to be the same every time.

It was the thrift fish sandwich of British childhoods, the jar in the door of the larder that turned plain bread into a filled lunch for pennies. A grandmother's tea, a packed lunch, a picnic where the paste sandwich sat next to the egg one: the cultural home is domestic and frugal rather than grand. The brand on the jar is half the memory, Shippam's above all, and the gesture everyone recalls is running a small knife around a nearly empty pot to win the last of the pink for one more slice. It is bought by the jar, kept in the cupboard, and reached for without thinking.

Its nearest relatives are the other potted spreads sold in the same small jars, each a different creature beaten to the same smoothness. The crab version carries shellfish into the format; the beef and chicken pastes leave fish behind for cured meat at the same spreadable consistency. Flaked tinned salmon bound with mayonnaise is a different sandwich that keeps the fish visible and the texture rough, the opposite handling of the same raw material. Sliced smoked salmon is a third thing again, a cured sheet rather than a cooked spread. The line that holds is smoothness: if you can see the fish, it is not this.

Shippam's and the Chichester Jar

The spread in the jar has a maker and a town. Charles Shippam ran a provisions business in Chichester, West Sussex, and the firm that bore the family name opened its first dedicated factory, a flint building behind 47 East Street, in 1892, where it ground and potted meat and fish into the small pots that became its trade. Salmon paste was a staple of the range, the fish shipped in from Canada and the United States and worked into the smooth pink spread sold across Britain.

The jar that carried it changed the product. In 1906 Shippam's began packing its pastes into sterilised glass jars sealed with airtight metal lids, replacing the older ceramic pots topped with waxed paper, and the squat clear glass jar with its small round lid became the shape generations recognised on the shelf. The clear glass showed the even pink of the salmon paste through the side, which a stoneware pot never had.

In 1948 Shippam's was granted a Royal Warrant as supplier of meat and fish pastes to King George VI, renewed for Queen Elizabeth II in 1955. The flint factory stood behind East Street in Chichester from 1892, and Shippam's salmon spread is still made in the town under the Princes name.