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SALMON CUTLETS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Cut some slices of salmon in the shape of chops. Put them into a saute-pan or stewpan with some clarified butter, pepper, and salt, and toss them, when dinner-time is come, over an equal fire. Drain the butter well, and dish the slices of salmon like a crown. Serve with maitre d'hotel sauce. For salmon you must not use any cream, as this fish is already heavy for the stomach; put into a stewpan three spoonfuls of sauce tournee well reduced; add to it a thickening of one egg, and refine the sauce with a quarter of a pound of butter, some salt, a little cayenne, the juice of half a lemon, and some parsley chopped very fine; work this sauce very fine, and use it when wanted. You may give this dish with several different sauces, as marechal, Dutch, caper, Maintenon, ravigote, etc.
A straightforward sauté of salmon steaks with a rich butter sauce, written for a kitchen that kept stock-based sauces standing ready. Two things need translation: the sauce base, and the egg that thickens it.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the beaten egg goes into the sauce it must not boil, or it will scramble and break the emulsion. Keep the pan below a simmer, off direct heat, and beat in the butter a piece at a time.
- Sauce tourneeA pale blond-roux sauce made with veal or chicken stock, closely related to what later settled into velouté; "well reduced" means cooked down until it coats a spoon. Three spoonfuls probably means about 3 tablespoons, so this makes a small, intensely buttered sauce. A reduced velouté or a well-flavoured fish velouté stands in for it.
- Clarified butterUsed because the milk solids in whole butter scorch at sauté heat. Ghee does the same job, though it tastes nuttier; a neutral oil with a knob of butter added at the end is the modern shortcut.
- "An equal fire"Steady, even, moderate heat rather than a fierce one — call it medium. The instruction to toss them "when dinner-time is come" means the fish is cut and seasoned in advance but cooked at the last minute.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Inch-thick salmon needs roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side, to an internal 120–125°F for translucent centres, up to 145°F if you want it fully opaque. Nineteenth-century practice cooked it considerably further.
- CutletsCut crosswise steaks about an inch thick, then trim to a chop shape; the tail end of the fillet, cut on the bias, gives the same result with less waste.
- Two different "maitre d'hotel"Today the phrase almost always means a compound butter of parsley, lemon and salt. Here it is the older sauce version — the same flavours carried in a thickened stock base.
- Yield and dishingFigure one cutlet of 5 to 6 oz per person. "Dish like a crown" means overlapping them in a ring on a round platter, sauce poured into the centre or served separately.
The recipe reads like a translation from a French professional kitchen, and its aside — that cream must be left out because salmon "is already heavy for the stomach" — belongs to a long tradition of treating rich fish as a matter of digestion as much as taste. Sauce tournée, the blond stock sauce, was one of the working foundations of the nineteenth-century sauce cupboard; it survives now mainly as velouté, and the list of alternatives offered at the end (maréchal, Dutch, caper, Maintenon, ravigote) is essentially a roll-call of the classical repertoire that a well-run kitchen was expected to have on hand. Salmon at this date was largely a seasonal spring and summer fish, generally sold whole and cut down at the fishmonger's, which is consistent with the recipe assuming slices from a large body rather than pre-cut portions.