On the last Saturday in April, Rosa Whittaker carries a small white styrofoam cooler from her car to her back porch in the east end of Toronto. Inside the cooler, packed in shaved ice from the fish shop, are four whole rainbow trout, each about thirty centimetres long, gutted and gilled but otherwise whole.
She has been buying her trout from the same shop on Gerrard Street East — a Sri Lankan-owned place called Coastal Fresh — since 2011. The owner, Mr. Wijesinghe, calls her at home when the local rainbow comes in from a small farm near Peterborough.
The fish cost her thirty-two dollars in total.
On the porch she has already assembled what she calls the smoker, which is not really a smoker. It is a cardboard wine box, twelve bottles, with the top flaps removed. Inside the box she has suspended a wooden dowel across the upper opening; she will hang the trout from S-hooks on this dowel.
At the bottom of the box she has placed a small electric soldering iron — the cheap kind, fifteen watts, bought at a hardware store on Bloor in 2014 — with its tip resting inside a stainless-steel teacup filled with hardwood sawdust. The soldering iron heats the sawdust to the point of smouldering, but never to the point of flame. The result is a steady stream of cool smoke at a temperature well below 30 degrees Celsius, which is the upper limit for true cold-smoking.
The whole rig cost her, originally, about twenty-two dollars. It has survived a dozen springs.
Before the smoking comes the cure. She fillets the four trout on her kitchen counter with a flexible boning knife, taking the bones out of each fillet with fish tweezers — a slow operation that takes her about forty-five minutes for the four fish.
She lays the eight fillets, skin side down, in a shallow ceramic baking dish. She covers them with a cure of two parts kosher salt to one part white sugar by weight, plus a tablespoon of crushed black peppercorns and the zest of a single lemon. The cure goes on thick — about a quarter-inch over the flesh.
She covers the dish with plastic wrap, places a smaller pan on top of the wrap with a few cans of tomatoes as weight, and refrigerates the whole thing for fourteen hours.
By the next morning the cure has drawn a substantial amount of liquid from the fillets. The flesh has firmed up considerably and turned from a pale orange to a deeper coral. She rinses each fillet under cold water for thirty seconds, brushes off any remaining salt with her fingers, and pats them dry with paper towels.
She lays them on a wire rack set inside a sheet pan and returns them to the refrigerator, uncovered, for another six hours. This is the pellicle stage. The surface of the fish develops a slightly tacky, slightly shiny skin — a thin protein layer that will catch and hold the smoke flavour during the cold-smoke.
By two in the afternoon the fillets are ready.
She fills the teacup at the bottom of the cardboard box with maple sawdust from a small bag she keeps in the basement, plugs the soldering iron into a porch outlet, and watches the first wisps of smoke rise.
She hooks each fillet through the thick end with a stainless-steel S-hook and hangs it from the dowel inside the box. The fillets dangle in the cool smoke, slowly turning a deeper amber over the hours.
She refills the sawdust about every ninety minutes. The whole smoke runs for six hours.
The outdoor temperature on April 26 is around eight degrees Celsius. The inside of the box, she measures with a kitchen thermometer she pokes through a small slit cut in the side, stays around fourteen degrees throughout. Well below the danger zone. Well within the range of a proper cold smoke.
At eight in the evening she takes the fillets down. The flesh is deep gold-amber, firm to the touch, slightly translucent. The skin is mahogany.
She wraps each fillet individually in parchment and refrigerates them overnight to let the smoke flavour even out. Smoked fish eaten the moment it comes off the rack tastes of campfire. Smoked fish rested for twelve hours tastes of itself.
By Sunday morning they are ready.
The first one she slices thin on the bias, with the same boning knife, and serves on a small toast with a smear of crème fraîche and a few capers. The flavour is delicate, gently saline, distinctly smoky without being aggressive. The texture is silky.
The second fillet she dices and folds into scrambled eggs with chives for a Sunday brunch with her husband. The third she shares with a friend who comes for tea on Tuesday. The fourth she packages and gives to her neighbour Marguerite, who has fed her cat during three separate trips.
The four remaining fillets — yields, after curing and trimming, of about three hundred grams each — keep in the refrigerator for about ten days, wrapped tightly in parchment then plastic. She vacuum-seals two of them for the freezer, where they will hold for three months without serious loss of quality.
The whole production, from the call from Mr. Wijesinghe to the last vacuum-sealed bag in the freezer, takes her about two days and costs roughly forty dollars including the sawdust and a new spool of plastic wrap.
She is asked, occasionally, why she does not buy a proper smoker. Her answer is that the cardboard box works, the soldering iron has not failed her in twelve years, and the day she replaces the rig is the day she stops enjoying the project. There is a kind of dignity, she has decided, in the refusal to upgrade something that already does what it is meant to do.
