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Halibut Steak a la Flamande
1 large halibut steak; 1 chopped onion; yolk of 1 egg; 1 tablespoonful of lemon juice; 1 saltspoonful of pepper; 1 teaspoonful of salt; 1 tablespoonful of butter.
Wash and wipe the steak. Sprinkle the chopped onion over the bottom of a greased baking-pan and lay the fish on this. Turn the beaten yolk of the egg over the steak; dust with salt and pepper, pour over the lemon juice, and the butter cut into small pieces. Place in a hot oven and bake thirty minutes. Turn out on a hot platter and garnish with parsley and slices of lemon. Serve with a brown sauce made in the pan the fish was cooked in.
A straightforward baked halibut whose only real trap is the timing: thirty minutes in a hot oven will dry out any steak a modern fishmonger sells.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F, and the upper end suits this dish, where the butter and egg yolk want to brown quickly.
- TimingHalibut is lean and firms up fast. Figure about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at 425F, or until the centre reads 130-135F; a 1-inch steak is done in 10-12 minutes. Thirty minutes suits only a very thick cut of two inches or more, closer to what a whole halibut yielded when these steaks were cut across the fish.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The full teaspoon of salt is generous for one steak; salt to your own taste if the fish is under a pound.
- Size of the steak"One large halibut steak" could mean a two-pound cross-cut slab serving four. Two 6-8 oz portion steaks will feed two and need the shorter bake.
- The egg yolkBeaten yolk poured over the fish sets into a thin gilded glaze rather than a sauce. Brush it on evenly or it bakes in streaks.
- The onion bedChopped raw onion under the fish scorches at this heat if the pan is dry. Keep the butter and lemon juice going over the top so the drippings collect, or soften the onion in a little butter first.
- The pan sauce"A brown sauce made in the pan" assumes a household stock and a roux to hand. Deglaze the pan with a few tablespoons of stock or dry white wine, scrape up the onion and browned bits, and thicken lightly with a knob of butter worked with flour.
- YieldAs written, two to four servings depending on the steak. Serve immediately; baked halibut stiffens as it cools.
A la flamande, "in the Flemish manner," is one of the shorthand garnish names French cookery lent to English-language books, though what it denoted varied considerably from book to book. Halibut appears often in American compilations of this era because the New England and Nova Scotian fleets landed large quantities of it, and a fish that size was sold in cross-cut steaks -- a cut that behaves more like meat than fillet and so invited meat treatments such as this one. The recipe's economy, cooking the sauce in the same pan as the fish, is typical of a household manual written for a cook working alone.