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Halibut a la Creole
Marinate a halibut steak for an hour in oil, lemon juice, and onion, with a sprig of parsley. Drain, and put the fish on the rack of the roasting-pan. Turn over it a sauce made of 1 cupful of strained tomatoes, a tablespoonful of butter, half a tablespoonful of flour, a few drops of onion juice, salt, and a little paprika. Cover closely, and bake until the fish is tender. Then sift over the fish a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan or American cheese; cook with the cover off for five minutes longer. Lift the fish out carefully to a hot platter, and pour the sauce around it.
A straightforward baked fish with a thin tomato sauce; the original assumes you know your own oven and your own fishmonger. Two things need supplying: an oven temperature and a doneness cue.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A covered fish dish of this kind suits a moderate oven, around 350-375F. Much hotter and the steak overcooks before the sauce has settled.
- Timing"Until the fish is tender" is usually reckoned at about 10 minutes per inch of thickness, but that rule assumes a hot oven; covered in a moderate one, allow longer and begin checking a 1 1/2-inch steak at about 20 minutes, plus the 5 uncovered minutes for the cheese. Halibut is lean and turns dry and chalky quickly; cook to 145F in the thickest part and let it rest.
- The marinadeNo quantities are given. For one steak, about 3 tablespoons oil, the juice of half a lemon, a few thin onion slices and the parsley sprig is enough to coat it. An hour is the maximum: the lemon juice will begin to firm and whiten the surface of the flesh beyond that.
- Strained tomatoesIn books of this period this generally meant tomatoes, fresh or canned, pressed through a sieve - not concentrated paste. Plain passata, or canned crushed tomatoes pushed through a sieve, is the nearest substitute.
- Making the sauceThe recipe does not say how the sauce is assembled, but cooking the butter and flour together for a minute before the tomato goes in, then simmering until it just thickens, avoids the pastiness of raw flour.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without pieces: grate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp in a sieve. A few drops means only a very small amount.
- "American cheese"In a book of this date this means ordinary domestic cheddar, not the processed slices sold under that name today. Use a firm aged cheddar or the Parmesan.
- The rackSetting the steak on the roasting-pan rack under a close cover means it bakes in its own steam with the sauce running beneath it. A shallow baking dish with foil works the same way and makes it far easier to lift the fish out whole.
- YieldOne halibut steak of 1 to 1 1/2 lb serves two, or three at a light meal.
"À la Creole" in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had settled into a reliable shorthand: tomato, onion, and a pepper of some kind, an echo of New Orleans cooking domesticated for northern kitchens and northern pantries. Here the pepper is paprika, which was gaining popularity in American kitchens in this period and gave colour and mildness where cayenne would have given heat. Halibut was the obvious carrier - a firm, thick-cut, thoroughly respectable fish sold in steaks that held their shape under a sauce. The finishing dust of grated cheese, browned briefly with the cover off, belongs to the same era's fondness for gratins.