Every salmon has thirty-three pin bones, Darren told us solemnly, no matter how big the fish is. A small one or a whopper, it’s always thirty-three. I wrote it down with a healthy dose of skepticism, and later that evening I did what any of us would do and looked it up. The internet confirmed my suspicions; anywhere from twenty-seven to forty bones, depending on who you ask and presumably which fish they asked. But Darren has spent thirty years with tweezers in his hand, and if the rogue fish disagrees with him, I suspect that fish is wrong.

It was one of the many interesting things I learned on Wednesday, 14 October, when around twenty-five of us from the Guild spent the day at H. Forman & Son on Fish Island in Hackney Wick, the world’s oldest smoked salmon producer. The day began in their restaurant and bar, with large windows overlooking the canal and the London Stadium. We settled in with that view on a gorgeous, sunny morning and listened to Lance Forman, the owner, tell us how it all began.

It began in 1905 in East London, with his great-grandfather, Aaron “Harry” Forman, a method from Eastern Europe, fish from Scotland, and a cure done in London; and out of that marriage Britain got what they call its first homegrown gourmet food. I’m not sure who gets to decide a title like that, but I wasn’t going to argue with a family that has been at it for a hundred and twenty-one years. Somebody official clearly agreed, anyway, because the London Cure now has PGI status, the same legal protection as Champagne, Parma ham, and Melton Mowbray pork pies. It was London’s first ever protected food, and it’s the only smoked salmon in the world to have it. They’re one of the last originals still standing because, largely, they refused to change their smoking and curing technique when plenty of others did.

It hasn’t been a smooth hundred-plus years though. There was a fire. There was a flood. There was the eviction, which my notes describe only as “politically turbulent,” underlined, and there’s a Boris Johnson connection that I’ll leave Lance to tell you about himself, because I’m certain he tells it best. They have moved their factory more than once, and along the way they opened a dark kitchen for caterers and branched into cheffing, with a kitchen run by Lloyd Hardwick (of Le Gavroche fame) and a home delivery arm called Forman & Field (which, as you might guess, is what saved their business during COVID).

The world has fallen out of love with smoked salmon over the last thirty-odd years. It used to be posh. It used to be the thing you had when something was worth marking. Somewhere it slid into a plastic pack bought in December because it’s December. Lance is trying to change this perception.

Lance told us something that recalibrated my understanding of smoked salmon entirely. The smoke is not the point. I had always assumed, like most people, that smoked salmon was about the smoke, that the smokiness was the signal of luxury. It isn’t. The smoke is there to preserve the fish; that’s its only job. The flavour is meant to be the salmon, and so the salmon has to be very good, and very fresh, within two days of being harvested, and it is always Scottish. Norway produces about eight times as much and sells it ten to fifteen per cent cheaper, even though it’s the same fish, same species, same everything. Lance chooses Scotland anyway, and you can tell most of their business ethos in that one decision.

Then they kitted us out. White coats, hairnet caps, plastic covers over our shoes. Twentyfive food writers looking like an erratically organised forensics team, down we went to the processing floor, which is kept at around 5°C. Despite the warning to dress in warm layers, we were freezing within minutes and stayed that way, stamping and shuffling a bit, while the fish, who were very much in their element, carried on oblivious.

This is where we met Darren, who is charming in the way of people who have been doing one thing brilliantly for a very long time are. He has been here thirty years, starting at sixteen on a youth training scheme. The drying racks behind him were encrusted with rust, very likely older than some of the people in the room, and the fillets hung from hooks on bits of string in long amber rows, like dry-cleaned clothes waiting to be collected.

He showed us how to read the fish. The size is shown by the number of holes and the places they trim the skin off. This also helps cure the fish evenly depending on their size. You can ask for the cut you want, lean or fatty. The long cut is one or the other, and the D cut gives you both.

He proudly holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to bone and slice a smoked salmon, one minute and 24.18 seconds set in October 2008; he has since bested his own record. Famously, he has had to fend off Gordon Ramsay to keep his title.

Darren then delighted us with a demonstration of this apparently coveted skill, his hand whizzing across the fillet with his trusted pair of tweezers. The freshest fish, filleted by hand, because a good filleter will scrape every last bit of flesh off the bone in a way no machine can. They do not waste any part of the fish, and even the heads don’t go to waste. Some of it is used for bio-fuel, and the rest is fed to the lucky cats in the neighbourhood. Someone also decided to make a dress out of salmon skin. And a wallet. And a flask, which I still have a few questions about. I’m told salmon skin is stronger than cowhide, so they’re planning to turn the skins into leather properly, which means the flask may not be the last of it.

After the filleting, it is cured with rock salt. They leave the belly bone and the backbone in while it cures, because otherwise the thin belly drinks up too much salt and the fillet ends up over-seasoned. Then they go into the kiln for a twenty-four-hour cycle of smoking and drying, with smoke from oak logs made by friction (it used to be less efficient and far less sustainable wood chips). It’s cold-smoked at 28C, so the fish never cooks, and that is the whole difference between this and hot-smoked salmon, where the fish cooks as it smokes. After that, it’s trimmed, pin-boned, sliced, and packed – every stage by hand, and the whole thing, from fish to finished side, takes about three days.

Back upstairs, thawing out by the windows, we began the long-awaited tasting. Lance went round with a plate held up like a proud parent, introducing each piece as if it were a member of the family. It came on a square glass plate alongside bread and a thick smear of butter on the side, the salmon folded into rolls and ribbons, like little roses that we collectively paused to admire and photograph. The traditional smoked salmon ran down the right, lean at the top and fatty at the bottom, and it was the fatty one that surprised me. Creamy, luscious, with the tiniest hint of smoke, so faint you could almost miss it, which I suppose was the point Lance had been making all morning. The smoke had done its job and then got out of the way. The lean sat just above it like the more disciplined sibling, and between the two of them I finally understood why anyone would bother asking Darren for a D-cut.

In the middle of that row was a sashimi cut from the top of the fish, the royal fillet. Across on the left, a gravadlax rolled tight and flecked with dill, cured with salt, sugar, pepper, star anise and fresh orange. Above it a gin and tonic cure, selected for a British Airways menu during the Olympics and curated by Heston Blumenthal, and below, a hot smoked piece that flaked apart under its glaze of maple, sesame and chilli. And in the centre, a tangle of salmon jerky, dark and challenging, unlike anything else on the plate. Capers scattered about, two little swirls of cream cheese with black pepper, pea shoots draped over everything making it look elegant and intentional.

And please, we were told, don’t ever put lemon on it. Lemon kills the flavour. Half the room looked around sheepishly, hoping someone else had also been guilty of this crime.

On my way back on the train, I tried to do the maths; thirty-three bones a side, every fish, since 1905. The number that I kept thinking about in the end wasn’t the bones. It was thirty, the years Darren has spent in that cold room, and a hundred and twenty-one, the years somebody has been standing there before him, doing it the same traditional way while everyone else found quicker ones. A cold room and a pair of calm hands, it turns out, are much harder to replace than you would think.