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Grilled Halibut with Parmesan
Take desired number of fillets of halibut and grill on both sides until nicely browned. Take from broiler, spread with Crisco, cover with grated Parmesan cheese, season with salt and dash of paprika on each slice, and set in hot oven until cheese is well browned and melted. Serve with lemon slices and potato balls tossed in melted Crisco containing chopped parsley.
A straightforward broiled fish dish from a shortening manufacturer's cookbook, which explains why Crisco appears three times in four sentences. The only real difficulty is timing: the fish is fully cooked before it ever goes into the oven.
- Broiler, not grill"Grill" here means the overhead broiler, as it still does in British usage. Set the rack about 4 inches below the element and expect 3-4 minutes a side for a fillet an inch thick.
- A hot ovenUnqualified "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Preheat it before you start the fish, since the cheese should brown quickly rather than sit there while the halibut dries out.
- Don't cook it twiceThis is the hinge. Halibut is very lean and turns chalky past about 130-135F at the centre. Pull it from the broiler while slightly underdone, then let the oven stage finish it while the cheese melts.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold but reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter or olive oil does the same job here and tastes better; the original specifies Crisco because the book was published to sell it.
- ParmesanGrated hard cheese browns and can scorch in seconds under high heat. Use real Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano, grated fine, and watch it continuously.
- SaltSeason lightly. Parmesan carries a great deal of salt already.
- Potato ballsMost likely cut from raw peeled potatoes with a melon baller (a parisienne scoop), then boiled or steamed until just tender before being tossed in fat and parsley; the recipe does not say. Allow roughly one medium potato per person.
- YieldThe recipe leaves the count open. Figure 6-8 oz of halibut per person as a main course.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a family of cookbooks issued by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s and 1920s to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced in 1911. The books were written as ordinary menu-and-recipe collections, with a full year of dinners planned out, but the recipes are built around the product, which is why shortening turns up here in a role butter would normally fill and again in the potatoes. The dish itself is of a type common in hotel-and-club cookery of the period: a lean white fish browned under the broiler, gratinated with Parmesan, and sent out with lemon and pommes parisienne.