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Baked Halibut with Tomato Sauce
2 lbs. halibut 2 cups tomatoes 1 cup water 1 slice onion 3 cloves 1/2 tablespoon sugar 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook twenty minutes tomatoes, water, onion, cloves, and sugar. Melt butter, add flour, and stir into hot mixture. Add salt and pepper, cook ten minutes, and strain. Clean fish, put in baking-pan, pour around half the sauce, and bake thirty-five minutes, basting often. Remove to hot platter, pour around remaining sauce, and garnish with parsley.
A straightforward baked fish in a strained tomato sauce, of the kind that filled cookery-school manuals around 1900. Two details need translating: the oven is never named, and the bake time assumes a thick centre-cut piece.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; period recipes of this kind left the heat to the cook's judgement. A modern oven at about 400F suits it; the sauce in the pan keeps the surface from drying while the fish comes up to heat.
- Thickness governs the timeThirty-five minutes suits a single thick 2 lb centre cut, 2 inches or more deep. Modern halibut steaks of 1 to 1 1/4 inches are done in 15 to 20 minutes; cooks aiming for moist fish pull it at 130-135F internal, though official guidance for fish is 145F. Overcooked halibut dries out and turns chalky quickly.
- Tomatoes"2 cups tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their liquid, though stewed fresh tomatoes would serve. A 14-15 oz can is close enough. Since the sauce is strained, whole or crushed both work.
- Strain, do not skipThe straining is the point of the method: it removes the onion, the cloves, seeds and skin, leaving a smooth sauce. A sieve pressed with the back of a ladle is enough.
- The rouxThree tablespoons each of butter and flour into roughly three cups of liquid gives a light coating sauce. Add the flour-butter paste to the hot tomato mixture off the boil and whisk, or it will lump; the ten minutes that follow cook out the raw flour taste.
- Cleaning the fish"Clean" here means rinsing and wiping the piece and trimming any dark membrane or fin remnants. Fish now comes ready for the pan; pat it thoroughly dry so the sauce clings.
- BastingBaste every ten minutes or so with the pan sauce. If the sauce reduces and starts to catch at the edges, add a spoonful of water rather than letting it scorch.
- YieldTwo pounds of halibut serves four generously, or five with a starch and a vegetable.
Halibut was a mainstay white fish of Northeastern American cookery at the turn of the twentieth century: firm enough to bake in a piece without falling apart, and shipped inland on ice by rail. The tomato sauce here is roux logic applied to canned tomatoes, thickened with butter and flour and strained smooth, the sort of general-purpose fish sauce common in cookery-school manuals of the period. Cloves and a half-tablespoon of sugar in a savoury tomato sauce look odd now, but such spicing appears often in nineteenth-century catsups and spiced tomato preparations, where warm spice and a little sweetness offset the acidity of the fruit. A border of parsley on a hot platter was a common finish of the era.