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Halibut, Stewed
Put the head and shoulders of a halibut, weighing about five pounds, into a saucepan, with just as much beer as will barely cover it. Add an onion stuck with two cloves, a sprig of parsley, a tea-spoonful and a half of salt, a tea-spoonful of pepper, and two ounces of butter rolled in flour. Let the fish stew gently until tender, which will take about half an hour. Take it out carefully, drain it, and thicken the sauce with a little flour and butter. Add a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, and a tea-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Let it boil, pour a little in the dish with the fish, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Probable cost, 6d. or 8d. per pound. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A Victorian braise in beer rather than court-bouillon, written for a cut of fish that has all but vanished from retail counters. Most of the adaptation is in sourcing and in restraint at the stove.
- The cut"Head and shoulders" means the collar end of a whole halibut. Ask a fishmonger for halibut collar or a bone-in steak from the thick end; two 1 lb bone-in steaks are a workable stand-in, though well short of the original's 5 lb piece.
- Which halibutAtlantic halibut is heavily depleted and generally advised against. Pacific halibut is the sustainable substitute and behaves identically in the pot.
- The hinge: never let it boilHalibut is very lean and turns dry and cottony a few degrees past done. Keep the beer at a bare shiver, and pull the fish at 130-135F at the thickest point.
- TimingHalf an hour suits a heavy bone-in head. Boneless steaks of an inch or so need 8-12 minutes; check early rather than trusting the clock.
- The beerThe recipe just says beer, and the household beer of the period was generally weaker and far less hopped than a modern IPA, which will make the sauce bitter as it reduces. Use a mild ale, brown ale or a lager, or half beer and half water.
- Butter rolled in flourEssentially a beurre manie: the recipe gives 2 oz butter and does not state the flour, so work in enough to coat it. Added at the start it thickens as the fish cooks; the second addition at the end is whisked in and the sauce then boiled, as the recipe directs, to cook out the flour.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup but a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain. A teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or a scant teaspoon of soy plus a drop of mushroom soaking liquor gives the same savoury lift.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of pepper for one fish head is assertive by modern taste; start with half. The salt is about right for a pot of liquid that becomes the sauce.
- YieldSix to seven portions from a 5 lb head assumes Victorian serving of a fish course. Two pounds of steaks will feed four as a main.
The price note is the giveaway to how this dish was pitched: sixpence or eightpence a pound put halibut within reach of a thrifty household in later nineteenth-century Britain. Stewing fish in beer rather than wine or water was familiar domestic practice in Northern Europe long before this book, the malt sweetness balancing an oily or coarse-textured fish; the same logic runs through German and Flemish carp and eel cookery. Mushroom ketchup, the seasoning that finishes the sauce, was a standard British bottled savoury of the period, older than tomato ketchup and used the way cooks now reach for Worcestershire or soy. The dish also tells you something about how the fish trade had changed: rail and ice had brought large North Atlantic flatfish inland cheaply enough that a cook could stew five pounds of head and call it economy.