Big City Salmon with Martini Sauce
by Susan Spicer with Paula Disbrowe
from Crescent City Cooking
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Makes 4 servings

A few years ago I created a menu of regional American dishes (both traditional and invented) for a special Fourth of July wine dinner. I wanted something particularly clever to represent Manhattan. I kept thinking of sophisticated New Yorkers drinking martinis and decided to try my hand at making a sauce with similar ingredients. I like the double dose of juniper with the deep, rich taste of wild salmon, and the olives add a distinctive briny note.

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Make the Martini Sauce
1. Place the shallot, gin, vermouth, juniper berries, and green peppercorns, if using, in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until reduced to about 3 tablespoons liquid. Add the cream and reduce to 1/4 cup.

2. Strain and return the liquid to the saucepan (discard the solids). Whisk in the butter. Add the olives and season to taste with lemon juice, salt, and a little pepper. Cover and keep warm while you prepare the salmon.

Make the salmon
1. Season each piece of salmon with salt and pepper and sprinkle with a little chopped parsley. If sautéing, heat the olive oil in a wide skillet and cook the fish, about 3 minutes on the first side, then about 2 minutes on the second side to achieve a medium-rare temperature. (Increase the cooking time by about 90 seconds on each side if you want the salmon to be cooked through.) You may also grill or broil the salmon, as desired.

2. Spoon the Martini Sauce over (or alongside) the cooked salmon and serve immediately. This salmon is delicious with boiled new potatoes or rice.

 

[Jeremy Schweitzer] I cooked this for a group of friends and we all liked it. Easy and interesting. This is a great dish for a romantic evening. As an aside, I actually prefer capers to olives and made it both ways, and the caper version was preferred by everyone.

[Dan Kraan] I would recommend the Atlantic salmon for this recipe, as it has a firmer, slightly leaner meat. The sauce really complements the salmon, and both are fairly quick and easy to prepare. I would make twice the amount of sauce next time as we were all scraping the salmon around the plate, trying to get every last bit of it! Less is more when it comes to the olives, so don't get too large a size, and for those that don't really care for olives, perhaps serving them on the side will allow olive lovers (and future olive lovers) to make their final decision on how much is enough.

[Kim Graham] This is the perfect dish to serve on a weeknight when you're having people over. It's sophisticated enough for company and so very easy to make. The sauce had wonderful flavors and a creamy texture that paired beautifully with the salmon.

[Cindi Kruth] We all loved this dish. The combination of ingredients produced a rich yet light sauce that went extremely well with the salmon. If there could be a complaint at all, it would be that we all would have liked a little more sauce. Easy enough to remedy next time. The sauce came together in a flash. I paired this with some green beans and a loaf of good bread, and dinner was ready in 15 minutes.

[Raye Tiedemann] This is wonderful. The salmon was crusty, tender, and paired with this unique sauce. I did find that the sauce amount wasn't as much as I thought it would be, but found that it's so rich it needs be spooned on sparingly. The briny pimento-stuffed olives were novel, a nice change. This is expected of Susan Spicer of New Orleans fame. We love our sauces! The basic sauce without the olives can also work well for those who aren't fond of olives. I noticed that the sauce will separate on standing, so serve as soon as it is done.