Some time ago, in the wake of a farmed salmon scare, I noticed that all canned salmon is wild salmon. I discovered later that 95 per cent of it is sockeye, or red, salmon caught in the Pacific off the coast of Alaska.

It comes with a certified sustainable tag issued by the Marine Stewardship Council, an independent, global, non-profit organisation set up to find a solution to the problem of overfishing (www.fishonline.org).

Inside the can, a huge piece of fish, usually with backbone and skin intact, is packed with nothing more than a pinch of salt. The salmon and the small amount of liquid produced during the canning process are rich in omega3 fatty acids, which help to reduce cholesterol levels. The fish is a tad mushy compared with other prepared salmon products, but extremely tasty and an undervalued resource.

My father was very partial to canned salmon and cucumber brown bread sandwiches, but I’ve come up with several other ways of using this unfashionable store cupboard standby.

Background

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When one of my sons turned up unexpectedly one Saturday lunchtime recently, I made a big salad with it, adding butter beans, rocket from our allotment, avocados and dill.

A creamy honey and lemon vinaigrette united these seemingly disparate ingredients. The sockeye sat in big chunks and the combination of flavours and textures was so successful that I wrote down the recipe.

On another occasion, I mixed a can of salmon with leftover mashed potato, buttery spring onions and more dill to make moist and moreish little rissoles. I served them with a creamy cucumber and dill sauce. This recipe stretched a 200g can to feed four people and was so good that I would happily make it again for a dinner party.

My final recipe is based on a seminal medieval pie combining fresh salmon with crystallised ginger, raisins and almonds. It was a star among a galaxy of dishes at the Hole in the Wall, George Perry-Smith’s restaurant in Bath, which in the Fifties and Sixties was the best place to eat outside London.

The recipe survives in numerous cookbooks but my cheats’ version owes a debt to the revised edition of English Food by Jane Grigson. The original is served with a creamy mustard and shallot sauce.

It lifts my puff pastry and canned fish effort into the stratosphere, although it is very good without.

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