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Halibut Steak Baked with Tomatoes
Wash and clean the fish, then lay in salad oil and lemon juice for an hour; place upon the grating of your covered roaster, and pour the following sauce over it: Make a rich sauce of either fresh or canned tomatoes, season with sugar, pepper, salt, and onion juice, and a sweet green pepper, seeded and minced. Cook for fifteen minutes, strain, rub through a colander, and then let it cool before pouring over the fish.
The original assumes a covered tin roaster with a rack and gives neither temperature nor cooking time, so the two things a modern cook most needs are the two things missing. Everything else in the method still works as written.
- Oven and timeBake covered at 400F. Halibut steaks need roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness measured at the thickest point, so a 1-inch steak is about 10-12 minutes and a 1 1/2-inch steak around 15-18. It is done at 140-145F internal, when the flesh has just turned opaque and separates from the bone.
- The covered roasterCovered roasters of the period were typically lidded tin pans, often oval, fitted with a rack that held the fish clear of its own juices. A shallow baking dish with a small wire rack, covered tightly with foil, does the same job; without the rack the underside stews rather than bakes.
- The marinadeAn hour in oil and lemon juice is for flavour, with the acid slightly firming the very surface of the flesh. Keep it in the refrigerator, not on the counter, and pat the steak dry before it goes on the rack so the sauce clings.
- Salad oilSimply a mild neutral oil in this period, usually cottonseed or a light olive. Any neutral oil or a mild olive oil serves.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, about a teaspoon. It gives onion flavour without pieces, which matters here because the sauce is strained.
- The sauceAbout 2 cups of tomatoes, fresh or canned, cooked 15 minutes with a teaspoon of sugar, the onion juice, salt, pepper and one seeded minced green bell pepper. Pushing it through a colander leaves a loose puree rather than a smooth sauce; that is intended, and it will thin further with the juices the fish releases.
- Cooling the sauce firstThe recipe insists the sauce be cooled before it is poured over the fish, though it does not say why. Follow it as written.
- YieldA 1 1/2 to 2 lb halibut steak with this quantity of sauce serves four.
Halibut was a major commercial fish of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The New England grounds were fished hard and were already showing decline by the later part of the century, and once rail connections reached the Pacific coast halibut was shipped east on ice from Puget Sound. Its firm, low-fat flesh cuts into steaks across the bone, which made it behave more like meat than like a delicate flat fish and suited it to cooking under a cover. Canned tomatoes were by this date cheap, reliable and available year round, and sweet green peppers were an increasingly familiar market vegetable.