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Halibut Turbans
Have 4 slices halibut cut 1/2 an inch thick; remove skin and bone, thus securing 16 fillets. Dip in melted Crisco; squeeze over juice of 1 lemon, little onion juice and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Commencing with the widest end, roll each fillet into a "turban" and fasten by running through each Criscoed wooden skewer. Bake 20 minutes, basting with hot stock, or Crisco melted in hot water. Arrange crown shape on serving dish. Fill the center with boiled potato-balls, dressed with salt, Crisco, and chopped parsley. Serve with Hollandaise sauce.
A straightforward baked fish dish from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, with two gaps a modern cook has to fill: no oven temperature and no explanation of how four steaks become sixteen fillets.
- The hinge: keep the rolls tight and shallowHalibut is lean and goes dry and cottony past about 130-135F at the center. Twenty minutes only works if the oven is hot enough to set the fish quickly and the rolls sit in a shallow pan where the basting liquid keeps them moist; check the thickest turban early rather than trusting the clock.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the book supplies no equivalent term to translate. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, is one plausible reading of a 20-minute bake for rolls this size; at a lower setting they will take longer. This is a modern guess, not something the text supports.
- Four steaks, sixteen filletsA halibut steak cut across the fish has bone and skin through the middle; removing them leaves four separate wedges of flesh per steak, hence sixteen. Buy about 2 lb of bone-in steaks cut 1/2 inch thick, or ask for boneless strips of similar size and skip the butchering.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it. Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold but reformulated; melted butter or a neutral oil does the same job here and tastes better with lemon and Hollandaise.
- SkewersWooden skewers go into a hot oven for twenty minutes, so soak them in water first to keep them from scorching, and cut them short enough to sit inside the pan. Cocktail picks work for rolls this small.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavor without pieces: grate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press a slice in a garlic press. A quarter teaspoon is plenty against one lemon.
- Basting liquid"Hot stock" means fish or light chicken stock. Add a few tablespoons to the pan at the start rather than baking dry, and spoon it over two or three times.
- Yield and servingSixteen turbans serve four as a main course. The Hollandaise is assumed to come from elsewhere in the book; make it while the fish bakes, since it will not hold long.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a family of cookbooks written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911 as a replacement for lard and butter. That accounts for the odd insistence here on dipping the fish in Crisco, greasing the skewers with Crisco, and dressing the potato balls with Crisco, where an ordinary recipe would simply say butter. The dish itself is older than the book and belongs to the French repertoire of paupiettes and turbans, the latter name usually said to come from the resemblance to a wound headdress -- a derivation that is traditional rather than documented -- which late-Victorian and Edwardian cooks adopted enthusiastically because they turned a plain fillet into something that could be arranged in a ring and centered with vegetables. Halibut was a natural choice: firm enough to hold a roll without falling apart, and by this period widely sold in thick crosscut steaks, with the Pacific fishery supplying much of the American market.