Home › The Principles of Cookery › HALIBUT (au Gratin)
HALIBUT (au Gratin)
Take one pound of the remains of cooked halibut, remove all skin and bone, and flake it into small pieces. Put one ounce of butter into a saucepan, and when melted stir in a heaped table-spoonful of flour; add gradually a quarter of a pint of milk and water in equal proportions, stirring all the time; season with pepper and salt. When smooth take it off the fire, butter some scallop shells, sprinkle them with bread-crumbs, lay a little of the fish in each, moisten with a dessert-spoonful of the sauce, add some more fish, then sauce, sprinkle with bread-crumbs, then put a few specks of butter on top of each, and bake in a sharp oven for five minutes.
A leftovers dish built on a small quantity of thin white sauce. The whole thing hinges on the fish already being cooked and the sauce being loose enough to moisten rather than bind.
- "A sharp oven"A hot oven, roughly 425-450F. Five minutes is only long enough to brown the crumbs and heat shells that are already warm; if the fish and sauce have gone cold, allow 10-12 minutes and expect the tops to take colour before the centres are hot.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 2/3 cup — half milk, half water. That is a deliberately modest amount of sauce for a pound of fish, and the result should look barely moistened, not creamy.
- Milk and waterThe dilution was economy, and it makes a plainer, less rich sauce. All milk gives a better result at no real cost; if you have any of the liquor the halibut was poached in, use it in place of the water.
- Scallop shellsReal shells were standard serving vessels for gratins of this kind. Small ramekins, cocottes or shallow gratin dishes of 3-4 oz capacity do the same job; butter and crumb them exactly as directed so the fish releases cleanly.
- FlakingRemove skin and bone while the fish is cold, when the flakes hold together. Keep the pieces reasonably large — halibut shreds to mush if worked over, and the layering the recipe calls for depends on some texture surviving.
- CrumbsDry, fine white crumbs, not coarse fresh ones, which will not brown in five minutes. Panko browns well but sits higher on the dish than the original intends.
- YieldOne pound of cooked fish fills about six shells as a first course, or four as a light supper dish with bread and a salad.
- Leftover fishCooked fish kept refrigerated should be used within two days, and this dish does not reheat a second time — the brief bake gives no margin.
Gratins in scallop shells were one of the standard Victorian and Edwardian answers to the question of what to do with the remains of a large fish. Halibut is sold in thick steaks or cut from a fish that may run to many pounds, so cold cooked halibut was a routine domestic surplus rather than a rarity, and the treatment is the familiar one: flake, bind lightly, crumb, brown. The au gratin label here means only the browned crumb and butter topping he that is scraped from the dish, and in nineteenth-century English cookery books it signalled the finish rather than any particular sauce. Serving in shells, real or in the porcelain and silver imitations sold for the purpose, let a cook present a small portion of reheated fish as a course in its own right, which was very much the point.</p>