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Halibut Collops, Baked
Cut four pounds of halibut into slices about half an inch in thickness. Sprinkle over these two tea-spoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, one of ginger, and two of chopped onions or powdered herbs. Put them into a pie-dish, with two ounces of dripping or fat, and pour over them a sauce made by boiling two ounces of flour with a pint of milk until smooth. An onion stuck with cloves may be put into the dish with the milk, to flavour it. Bake half an hour in a moderate oven, and send the sauce to table with the fish, first strewing over it two tea-spoonfuls of finely-chopped parsley. Probable cost, 6d. or 8d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A plain baked fish dish from the era when halibut was cheap. The main adjustment is time: half an inch of halibut does not need half an hour.
- CollopsSimply slices or cutlets — here half-inch slabs cut across the fillet or steak. Nothing is beaten or rolled, despite what the word suggests in Scottish mince cookery.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). The dish is covered by the sauce rather than browned, so a hotter oven gains nothing.
- Timing is the hingeHalf an hour will leave half-inch halibut dry and fibrous. It is a lean, low-collagen fish and is done at 125-130F internal, which takes roughly 12-18 minutes at 350F. Pull it when the flesh just parts into flakes.
- The pintA British pint of 20 fl oz, so 2 1/2 cups of milk to 2 oz (about 1/2 cup) flour. That is a thick, coating white sauce; slacken it with more milk if you want it pourable at table.
- Sauce without butterThe flour is boiled straight into the milk rather than cooked in fat; the 2 oz of dripping goes into the dish with the fish instead. Whisk the flour into cold milk first, then bring it up slowly, or it will lump. Give it a full two or three minutes at a simmer to lose the raw-flour taste.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping was the default cheap fat. Butter or a mild oil works and suits fish better.
- GingerGround dried ginger, used here as a warming seasoning rather than an Asian flavour note; it turns up from time to time in Victorian fish recipes. A teaspoon across 4 lb is subtle; scale back if it sounds wrong to you.
- YieldFour pounds of steaks serves six to eight generously, as stated. The book gives the probable cost as 6d. or 8d. per pound.
Cassell's belonged to the age of expanding cheap sea fish in Britain: rail transport, and later steam trawling, widened the reach of North Sea fish and cookery dictionaries filled up with workaday ways to bake, boil and curry it. The treatment here — salt, pepper, ginger, onion, a flour-and-milk sauce, an onion stuck with cloves — belongs to the standard English domestic idiom of the period, in which spice was used sparingly. The clove-studded onion steeped in milk is the same trick that underlies bread sauce and béchamel, and it survived into twentieth-century British cooking long after the ginger dropped out. Halibut itself has since gone the other way: heavily fished through the twentieth century, Atlantic halibut is now a conservation concern, and most halibut sold today is Pacific or farmed.