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SALMON (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Slice a moderate-sized onion into a dish. Put with it five or six small sprigs of parsley and a little pepper and salt, and pour over these a little good salad-oil. Lay side by side in the marinade three slices of salmon one and a half inches thick. Let them remain for half an hour, and turn them over once during that time. Drain them, and broil over a gentle fire. Dish them neatly, garnish with plainly-boiled potatoes and green parsley, and send a little maitre d'hotel sauce to table with them. This sauce may be made as follows. Work an ounce of flour smoothly with two ounces of fresh butter, and add a quarter of a pint of milk, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Stir the sauce over the fire till it is hot and smooth; add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley and the strained juice of half a lemon. When the sauce is on the point of boiling, pour it into the tureen, stir in it until dissolved a small piece of fresh butter, and serve. Time to broil the salmon, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. per pound when in full season.
A Victorian broiled salmon steak with a quick flour-thickened butter sauce. The two things to watch are the cooking time and the point at which the sauce is taken off the heat.
- Cooking timeTwenty minutes will give you dry, chalky fish. Steaks 1 1/2 inches thick need roughly 4-5 minutes per side over a hot grill or in a ridged pan, to an internal 120-125F for moist salmon. The book assumes wild Atlantic salmon cooked to firm flakes; farmed salmon has more fat and is better slightly underdone.
- "A gentle fire"Most likely a bed of coals past their flaming stage, i.e. steady moderate heat rather than a fierce one; the twenty-minute time suggests the book does mean genuinely gentle heat. Too fierce and the marinade oil flares.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 2/3 cup. Do not read it as the US 4 fl oz.
- The sauce is not a true maitre d'hotel butterModern maitre d'hotel is simply butter creamed with parsley and lemon. Cassell's version is a small white sauce, and it is easier if you cook the flour and butter together for a minute before adding the milk, then whisk the milk in gradually.
- Do not let it boil after the lemonThe acid and the final knob of butter both go in off the heat, or near it. Boiling after the lemon and butter thins the sauce and can split it.
- The marinadeHalf an hour in oil, onion, parsley and a little pepper and salt is a flavouring step, not a cure; the salt is slight and the time far too short for real penetration. Wipe the onion off before broiling or it will scorch.
- YieldThree thick steaks serve three, or two generously. The sauce quantity is right for that number.
- The price note1s. per pound is a period retail price and carries no useful information for shopping today beyond telling you salmon was a seasonal luxury.
The name goes back to the French maitre d'hotel, the head of household service, and is often said to mean a plain, quickly assembled finish that a steward could put together without a saucier -- parsley, lemon and butter, nothing more. By the late nineteenth century some English cookery books were giving it as a white sauce flavoured the same way, which is what is given here, though the parsley-lemon butter remained common. Salmon at this date was still a river fish with a defined season, netted rather than farmed, and the note on cost reflects a period when the price swung sharply between glut and scarcity.