Baked Halibut
Wipe a two ound slice of halibut. Arrange six or eight thin slices of fat salt pork in bottom of dripping pan, slice an onion thinly over pork, add a bit of bay leaf and arrange halibut over onion. Spread halibut evenly with a butter paste made of four tablespoons butter worked to a cream with three tablespoons flour. Season with one-half teaspoon salt and a few grains cayenne. Over butter paste sprinkle thickly-buttered cracker crumbs, and arrange alternately strips of pimento and thin slices of bacon over crumbs. Cover with a buttered paper and bake slowly one hour in a moderate oven. Remove paper the last fifteen minutes of cooking to brown the crumbs and bacon delicately. Remove to hot serving platter and garnish with shredded potatoes, sliced lemon and parsley.
A New England-style baked halibut steak, insulated top and bottom with pork fat. The method is sound; the hour in the oven is not, and that is the one change worth making.
- The hour is too longA two-pound halibut steak will be done in roughly 25 to 40 minutes at 350F, depending on thickness and on how thickly the butter paste, crumbs and paper insulate it; take it out when the flesh just separates into flakes (the USDA figure for fish is 145F at the centre). Halibut is very lean and turns dry and cottony well before an hour is up; the pork and butter paste exist precisely to fight that dryness, but they cannot save an hour of heat.
- "Two ound"A typographical slip for two pounds. That means a single thick cross-cut steak, roughly an inch to an inch and a quarter, not two thin fillets.
- Moderate ovenConventionally reckoned at about 350F. The recipe's "bake slowly" suggests the lower end of that range rather than a specific figure; the crumbs are browned in the final uncovered quarter-hour.
- Dripping panA shallow roasting or sheet pan, not a covered casserole. Choose one only slightly larger than the fish so the pork fat and juices stay around it instead of spreading out and scorching.
- Fat salt porkSold as salt pork or fatback; slice it thin, and if it is heavily cured give it a brief rinse. Blanched thick-cut bacon substitutes acceptably for the base layer, though it is smokier than intended.
- Buttered paperParchment, buttered on the side facing the fish, laid on loosely. It is not a foil seal: the point is to shield the crumbs from direct heat while letting steam escape.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda or saltine crackers, crushed coarse, tossed with melted butter until the crumbs just hold together. Panko works but browns faster, so watch the last ten minutes.
- Butter pasteFour tablespoons butter creamed with three tablespoons flour is a raw beurre mani times spread over the fish; it thickens the pork fat and fish juices into a sauce as it melts. Work it soft but not melted, or it will slide off before it sets.
- YieldServes four generously, five or six as part of a full Sunday menu. Spoon the pan juices over each portion.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) is generally attributed to Elizabeth O. Hiller, a Chicago cooking-school teacher who built the book as a year of complete menus rather than a list of dishes, which is why this halibut arrives filed under a season rather than under fish. The standard problem with halibut was the same one cooks meet now: a very lean white flesh that dries out under dry heat. The old answer was to bring the fat from outside, laying the steak on salt pork and roofing it with bacon, butter paste and buttered crumbs unhyphenated a technique of barding rather than larding. The strips of pimento are a period signature; canned Spanish sweet peppers had become widely available in American groceries by the 1900s and turn up constantly in Edwardian cookery as an inexpensive flash of red on an otherwise pale platter, alongside the obligatory lemon and parsley.