Slice the fish; season highly with salt, pepper, cloves, lemon-juice and parsley. Then roll in flour and fry in hot olive-oil until brown. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley. Serve with a lettuce salad with French dressing.
A plain pan-fry that depends entirely on the seasoning being genuinely aggressive and the oil being genuinely hot. The original assumes both.
- Cut and quantity"Slice the fish" is unspecified in the original; steaks or thick fillets around 3/4 inch suit the method better than thin slices. Figure 6-8 oz per person, so a 2 lb piece of halibut will serve four with the salad.
- Season highly, but the clovesGround cloves are the one seasoning here that will take over. A pinch for the whole batch is enough; measure it rather than shaking it on.
- Lemon juice before flourLet the seasoned fish sit only a few minutes in the lemon juice. Longer and the acid firms and whitens the surface, and the flour will not stick to a wet fish anyway — blot it before dredging.
- The frying oilOlive oil at about 350-365F. Ordinary olive oil or a light one is the safer choice; a peppery extra-virgin can turn bitter at frying heat.
- Time it by thicknessHalibut is lean and goes dry fast. Three to four minutes a side for a 3/4-inch steak; cooks aiming for a moist result pull it at an internal 130-135F and let it carry over off the heat, though 145F is the usual modern recommendation for fish.
- Parsley twiceThe parsley in the seasoning should be finely chopped and pressed on before flouring; the garnish parsley is separate.
- French dressingIn a book of this date that means simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together — no mustard, no sugar, nothing resembling the bottled orange dressing sold under the name now.
"A la Toulonaise" points at Toulon, the naval port on the Mediterranean coast of Provence, and the dish carries the marks of that coast: olive oil rather than butter for the frying, lemon rather than a flour-thickened sauce, salad alongside instead of a starch. Books like this one, which marched a reader through a year of dishes each labelled by nationality, used such place-names loosely — a French chef's garnish name became a shorthand for southern, oily, lemony treatment, and the label often traveled further than any documented local recipe. Halibut itself is a North Atlantic and Pacific fish rather than a Mediterranean one, so the pairing is an American kitchen borrowing a Provençal manner and applying it to the large firm white fish that the fishmonger actually had, which is more or less how the whole "dishes of all nations" genre worked.