Smoked Salmon and Dill

On a tiered tea stand, between the cucumber fingers and the egg-and-cress, sits a row of crustless brown-bread sandwiches with a green fleck running through their pale filling, and the green is dill doing something most herbs on fish cannot. Dill is feathery and faintly aniseed, with a cool sweetness, and it happens to be the exact herb packed into the salt-and-sugar cure that makes gravlax. So when it lands on cold-smoked salmon it does not cut the fish the way an onion or a caper would. It echoes a flavour the salmon has already been through. The herb deepens the smoke instead of fighting it, and that doubling, cure-herb laid over cure-fish, is the entire character of the sandwich.

The cream cheese is the engineering. Chop the dill fine and fold it all the way through the cheese, so the herb reaches every part of the bite rather than sitting in loose fronds that fall out at the first pull. Keep it measured, because dill turns soapy in quantity and would then smother the smoke it is meant to flatter. The cheese spread firm and to the edge does the waterproofing that butter does in a drier sandwich, sealing the brown crumb against the oil that weeps from the fish and binding the slices so they hold under a press. Slice the salmon to translucence and it folds into layers; cut it in slabs and it overwhelms a delicate herb and slides as one sheet out of the bread. A squeeze of lemon and a grind of pepper keep two soft, harmonising layers from reading as one flat note.

This is the most restrained sandwich in the tea repertoire, and its sensation is quiet by design. There is the cold ocean-salt smell of the smoke first, then the faint anise of the dill behind it. The bite gives with no resistance at all, soft bread on soft cheese on the silk of the fish, and the only edge in the whole mouthful is the prickle of lemon and the pepper at the finish. The salmon is cool against the roof of the mouth, slightly oily, dissolving rather than chewing. Nothing crunches. The herb arrives as a green coolness that lifts the smoke and then fades, and the sandwich is gone in two bites, the small scale a tea sandwich is cut for.

The grammar around it is the grammar of afternoon tea, a service with rules of its own. The sandwiches come crustless and cut into fingers or triangles, stacked on the lowest tier of the stand below the scones and the cakes, eaten first and with the fingers. In a hotel tea room, smoked salmon is the savoury that signals the occasion is a proper one, the upgrade over the everyday egg-and-cress, and it is ordered as part of the set rather than alone. The convention is brown bread, not white, by a long-standing rule that the darker loaf suits oily fish, and the brief is to keep everything soft and small so the filling, not the bread, carries the flavour.

The variations are the rest of the herbed-salmon shelf, each defined by the green note set against the same cured fish. Smoked salmon and chive swaps the cure-echo for an onion sharpness that cuts the fish rather than harmonising with it. A caper version brings a hard pickled brine instead of a soft herb. Cream cheese and cucumber on the same bread drops the fish entirely for a lighter tea finger. Gravlax is the close relation that takes the dill all the way into the cure, the salmon buried in dill, salt and sugar rather than cold-smoked, so the herb is inside the fish instead of beside it, and it belongs to its own tradition.

The salmon itself carries a London history that has nothing to do with tea rooms and everything to do with the East End. The cold-smoking that gives the fish its silk and its delicate, uncooked texture is the work of a refugee trade, and the British smoked salmon on every tea stand descends from a specific cure perfected in Stepney rather than in the Highlands. That is the documented thread under the soft bread.

Origin and history

Smoking salmon in Britain was, before the twentieth century, a Scottish business of heavy smoke and hard cures, the same logic that produces kippers. The delicate cold-smoked style came south with Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire, who had smoked oily river fish in Eastern Europe as a way to keep it without ice. Aaron "Harry" Forman, who left Odessa in the 1880s, set up in London's East End and opened H. Forman and Son in 1905.

Forman's move was to change the fish. Other immigrant smokers were importing barrelled salmon from the Baltic in seawater; Forman bought fresh Scottish salmon at Billingsgate market and cold-smoked it lightly, and the result was named the London Cure for the place that made it. The dill-and-cream-cheese pairing on the sandwich is a later, gentler graft, borrowing the herb of Scandinavian gravlax onto the smoked fish, but the silk-textured cold-smoked salmon it depends on is the Stepney trade's invention.

The word the dill ultimately belongs to is older than any of this. Gravlax takes its name from the Old Norse grafa, to dig, and lax, salmon: medieval Scandinavian fishermen, short of salt and barrels, lightly salted their catch and buried it above the high-tide line to ferment, and that buried, dill-flecked fish is the ancestor of the cure whose herb now flavours a smoked-salmon sandwich on a London tea stand.