Smoked salmon

I’m just about old enough to remember when smoked salmon was a rare treat. Then, around 1986 or 1987, suddenly it was everywhere. There were smoked salmon sandwiches at M&S, it was stuffed into lurid-looking canapés with cream cheese, and Christmas became a riot of salty fish. For me, smoked salmon is as emblematic of the 1980s as red Porsches, huge mobile phones and the Pet Shop Boys. But it’s almost always a disappointment, that acrid taste only palatable with lots of lemon juice and butter. I’d much rather have potted shrimp.

It’s a far cry from how Scottish smoked salmon is supposed to be. It was first produced, not in Scotland but in London by Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century. They took the Eastern European way of smoking fish and applied it to Scottish salmon from Billingsgate Market. It became a highly prized delicacy and there were dozens of smokehouses in the East End, but in the 1980s industrialised smoked salmon killed them all, except for one, H.