Salmon Paste

A Shippam's postcard from the 1930s names the fish behind the firm's pastes: salmon, shrimps and lobsters, all bought in from abroad. The company said its salmon came from Canada and the United States, so a spread eaten at a Sussex tea table was made from Pacific fish that had crossed an ocean in tins before reaching the factory in Chichester. Spooned out of its glass jar onto buttered white bread, that salmon arrives as a smooth, even pink paste, with no flake or bone left in it. The sandwich is the paste, the butter, and two slices of soft white loaf cut into triangles, and it asks very little of the person making it beyond a clean knife.

Butter goes on first and goes on soft, because cold butter drags at the crumb of sliced white and tears holes in it. The paste goes over the butter in a single scrape, thin enough that the bread still shows faintly through it at the edges. The jar smells of tinned salmon with a sweetness underneath, like the first minute of a fish pie, and the paste is cool and slightly grainy on the knife. A thick layer turns the sandwich pasty: the salt climbs, the paste clings to the roof of the mouth, and the second triangle goes uneaten. A thin one leaves a savoury, faintly oily film that the butter rounds off, with a salt hit on the lips that fades by the swallow.

The salt is the reason for the thin scrape and also the reason the jar sits unopened for so long. Sealed glass keeps a paste like this in the cupboard until its printed date, and Shippam's is said to have begun putting its meat and fish into sterilised glass jars with airtight metal lids in 1906. Once the lid is lifted the position reverses. An opened jar belongs in the fridge and wants finishing within a few days, which is a good argument for making a plate of sandwiches rather than one. The knife scrapes the glass shoulders for the last of it, and the lid taps shut on an empty jar more often than on a half-full one.

A few slices of cucumber are the usual addition, laid over the paste so the cool water in them cuts the salt, and a pinch of cress does a similar job with a peppery bite. Salmon paste is the mild member of its row, gentler than anchovy or bloater, which is why it turns up on children's plates, in packed lunches, and on plates of crustless triangles at teas. It travels well in foil, softening into the bread by midday until the pink has stained the crumb a faint salmon at the join, which some people prefer to the sandwich fresh.

The pink matters on white bread. Against the pale crumb the paste keeps a salmon colour that reads as fish before the first bite, a point in its favour on a tea plate where the crab and bloater jars go tan and grey. A fork can loosen it with a little extra butter for bread that is slightly stale, and some cooks do, though a jar spread straight is the version most people remember. The sandwich is judged on how evenly the paste is spread, how fresh the loaf is, and whether anyone remembered the butter, and a plate of triangles usually clears in the order the cucumber ones go first.

Chichester and the glass jar

Shippam's is the name most often attached to British jarred fish paste. The family firm dates itself to 1750 as provision merchants in Chichester, and Grace's Guide records a new factory in 1912, with a Novium Museum account placing it along East Walls and crediting Wilfrid Shippam. Accounts differ on small points, including which year the move into potted meats and fish pastes began, with dates in the 1890s given, so only the later dates stand on firm ground.

The firmer one is 1906, the year the company is said to have begun packing its meats into sterilised glass jars with airtight lids. Glass let a buyer see the pink before taking the jar home, and it made the spread a dependable item for the sort of household that wanted salmon sandwiches for a Sunday tea without buying a fresh fish. No record names the first person to put the paste between slices of bread, and the jar was never sold with a recipe on it.

The East Walls factory made the pastes until 2002, when production moved to a Princes Foods site on Terminus Road, with the 2001 and 2002 dates appearing in different accounts. The site was redeveloped in 2006, and what the passer-by sees today is the old factory frontage with its clock still on the wall above the pavement where the lorries once loaded the jars.