- Michael Gebert
- Smoked salmon from H. Forman & Son
The first thing I ask Ethan Forman as he slices smoked Scottish salmon in my kitchen is where’s his English accent? “Everyone asks that. I came to this country when I was three,” he answers in flat midwestern tones.
“Many of our competitors inject brine into the salmon, as part of their cure,” he says. “Brine actually adds water to the salmon flesh. So what they’re actually doing is selling salmon with 30 or 40 percent water to beef up the weight. We’ve never used brine. There’s no reason to.”
We try this smoked salmon—their lead product—two ways, by itself and on a bagel. There are people who object to sexual metaphors in food writing, in which case they need to just skip to the next paragraph now. It is impossible to avoid impure thoughts as this unabashedly sensual ribbon of supple flesh, buttery and lush and delicate, flicks and rolls about on your tongue. It’s an eyes-roll-back-in-your-head culinary experience, as rich and intoxicating and transporting as anything I’ll have this year, I think.
“We’ve been in London for 109 years, which is longer than anyone has been smoking salmon,” Forman says as he’s packing his goods up and putting them back in his cooler. “We use nothing but the traditional, intended ingredients. And the fourth ingredient on our packaging is ‘love.’ Why does it say love? Because we care about our product, we care about our consumers, we care about what they put in their bodies.” Which is probably not how his great-grandfather the Russian immigrant fishmonger would have put it exactly, but in terms of the fish they sell, it seems to amount to the same thing.
