A Matter of Taste 
A Fish Story 
The salmon s decline in the Pacific Northwest 
is a tale with many villains and few heroes 
by Raymond Sokolov 
The best fish story I know revolves 
around a Finnish-American woman 
called Vanessa and an extremely large 
salmon. Some years ago, Vanessa was 
spending a weekend with a friend in 
Cooperstown, New York. The salmon 
arrived the same weekend, brought 
from Alaska by a neighboring plu- 
tocrat. Vanessa’s host heard about the 
majestic fish and knew that it was 
languishing in the refrigerator of its 
owner, whose culinary ineptitude was 
local legend. Vanessa, a cook of skill 
and daring, resolved to liberate the 
noble salmon and give it fitting gas- 
tronomic treatment. Seizing a moment 
when the plutocrat and his family were 
busy at tennis, she crept into the 
house, purloined the Oncorhynchus, 
and poached it to a turn in her host’s 
kitchen. She boned and glazed the 
fish and returned it to the owner’s 
refrigerator. 
In fact, Vanessa only returned half 
the salmon and kept the other half 
for the delectation of herself and her 
friends. It seemed only fair, in light 
of the service rendered. And when 
the rightful owner saw the beautifully 
decorated, flaky, pink chaudfroid 
salmon ready to eat in his fridge, he 
was delighted. 
Not all the salmon stories have such 
happy endings. The Pacific North- 
west, oncd a salmon paradise, is today 
a region made glum and angry by 
the salmon’s decline. As an outsider, 
I want to speak with caution about 
Pacific salmon. It is a most compli- 
cated subject. Ask almost anyone in 
Washington State about salmon and 
the usual reply is a shake of the head, 
because the salmon question has as 
many sides as a sockeye has scales. 
Consumers blame industrial pollut- 
ers. Environmentalists lambaste the 
power companies that built the dams 
that block the rivers and impede 
salmon from making their way up- 
stream to spawn. Non-Indian fisher- 
men bristle over the federal court rul- 
ing that compels them to share the 
shrinking salmon catch with Indian 
fishermen on a strictly equal basis. 
But the Indians, prospering materially 
because of this judicial interpretation 
of their treaty rights, will still probably 
never regain the salmon-centered way 
of life they led before the coming of 
the white man. 
Northwest Coast Indians had some 
9,000 years in which to perfect an 
intricate salmon-catching technology, 
a salmon cuisine, and various rituals 
celebrating the importance of salmon 
in their culture. Hilary Stewart’s ex- 
haustive Indian Fishing: Early Meth- 
ods on the Northwest Coast (Univer- 
sity of Washington Press) is a fas- 
cinating encyclopedia of salmon lore 
that shows, for example, exactly how 
to make bentwood hooks and how the 
Nootka tribe trolled for salmon in open 
water just before the run. Stone sink- 
ers, bone barbs, spruce-root lashings, 
leaders of human hair or doeskin or 
cedar bark twine — all these natural 
materials were combined laboriously, 
baited with fish caught in small stone 
dams, and run out on a long line. 
The fisherman fastened the line to 
his paddle handle so that he could 
locomote and make his baited hook 
move at the same time. 
Other fishermen used harpoons or 
gaff hooks carved from antlers and 
elaborate nets made of willow-bark 
twine or homespun nettle fiber. In riv- 
ers, they could intercept running 
salmon with traps and weirs. 
Indian salmon cookery was also a 
sophisticated business. Watertight 
boxes and baskets were filled with 
water; then hot stones from a campfire 
were added with tongs. After the stones 
made the water boil, in went pieces 
of salmon in an openwork basket. 
Lacking metal ovens, the Indians 
dug steam pits in the ground or cooked 
split salmon over heated rocks, meth- 
ods very close to the East Coast clam- 
bake. 
The simplest and most famous 
method of salmon cookery in the Pa- 
cific Northwest was to roast the fish 
over a wood fire. Split salmon were 
held flat on roasting tongs or skewered 
on crossed sticks. The tongs and sticks 
had sharp ends so that they could 
be stuck in the ground at the edge 
of the fire. The whole apparatus was 
tilted slightly, and the salmon ex- 
tended over the heat. First one side 
of the fish was roasted, then the other. 
Traditional Indian salmon roasting 
continues to be practiced widely in 
Washington. The alderwood typically 
used in the process imparts a superb 
flavor to the fish, as I can attest, hav- 
ing tasted some that had been cooked 
over alder chips on a not-so-pictur- 
esque but effective metal grill at an 
open-air takeout counter in Seattle. 
Roast salmon was much more than 
a gourmet treat for Northwest Coast 
Indians in the old days. Rivers clogged 
Photographs by Adelaide de Menil 
100 
