My Favorite Way to Make Salmon Even Better

Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Heather Greene.

Much can be said about salmon. Its life cycle is so remarkable that its sheer survival seems to invoke some odds-defying metaphors. Tenacity, audacity, resilience: If anyone wants to anthropomorphize salmon, its heroic qualities are there for the taking. To get through life’s upstream struggles, we all just need to be a bit “more salmon.”

Just as heroic are those who are calling urgent attention to what we are doing to the planet — and how it affects salmon: industrial pollution of its river habitat; systematic harvesting of wild fish from the sea; fish farming and the spread of sea lice; climate change. The sobering list goes on. In “Salmon: A Fish, the Earth and the History of Common Fate,” Mark Kurlansky links the fish’s fate and the future existence of our world.

Recipe: Black Lime Salmon

“If the salmon does not survive, there is little hope for the survival of the planet,” he writes with knowing and provocative frankness. Salmon holds a mirror to both human heroism and hubris.

But for all that’s written and said, the salmon fact that always hooks me is this: Between being born and reproducing years later, salmon travel many miles, journeying far and wide from the freshwater rivers of their birth to the salty seas. When it’s time to reproduce, they don’t return to the shelter of just any freshwater stream. They return to the same spot where they were born.