with so many things in this back-stabbing, dog-eat-dog world of food writers, there is almost universal disagreement on the subject. Everyone agrees that lox is a form of salmon, and that it has been cured - that salmon was cured for centuries by salting, brining, and/or smoking before the advent of refrigeration. Most people agree that the name comes from the German word for salmon, Lachs, but there are those who believe real credit should go to the Scandinavians, whose word for salmon is lax. Then things really get out of hand.

Anne Willan, in the wonderful, encyclopedic La Varenne Pratique, says, "Smoked salmon is different from American lox (usually served with bagels and cream cheese) since lox is unsmoked, salted salmon." A pretty cheeky comment from a such a refined Englishwoman, even if she does spend part of each year in the US.

Actually, we had a hard time finding anyone on this side of the Atlantic who did not affirm that lox is smoked. Then we came across James McNair's Salmon Cookbook, in which the author says that lox is the most popular preserved salmon, that it is generally Pacific species that is cured in brine, soaked to remove the salt, then "sometimes still lightly smoked after soaking it, as it always was in the past."

McNair, who has also written three or four thousand other cookbooks, defines a few other traditional salmon-preserving techniques: