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Halibut in Cucumbers
Cook the halibut till tender, in court bouillon-to two quarts of water add a few slices each of carrot, onion and celery; two or three cloves and peppercorns; a bit each of mace, bay leaf and parsley, a little salt and lemon juice.
Drain, and when cool remove skin and bone and pick the fish apart into fine flakes. Make a rich white sauce in the regular way, adding from a quarter to a half teaspoon of curry powder to every two cups of sauce, according to taste.
Pare, cut in halves and parboil in bouillon the required number of cucumbers.
Scoop out the inside of each half, fill with the creamed fish, cover with prepared crumbs-one-third cup of butter to every cup of dried bread crumbsand bake about half an hour or less, till the cucumbers are soft, but not till they lose shape. Serve with a lemon point on each plate. Anne Warner.
A composed fish dish built in three stages — poached halibut, a curried white sauce, and cucumber halves used as edible containers. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes you know how to hold each element without overcooking it.
- The hinge: do not overpoachHalibut is lean and turns cottony fast. Bring the court bouillon to a bare simmer, slip in the fish, and count on 8-10 minutes for a one-inch piece — it should just flake. The recipe gives no time, only "till tender."
- Court bouillon quantityTwo quarts is generous for the amount of fish implied; the surplus is presumably what you parboil the cucumbers in, since the recipe names no other bouillon. Strain and save it.
- Rich white sauceRead this as a thick béchamel: 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, cooked out for a few minutes so it does not taste of raw flour. It should mound on a spoon, since a loose sauce will run out of the cucumber.
- Curry powderA quarter to half teaspoon per two cups is a whisper by current standards — the period wanted a faint warmth, not a curry. Bloom it in the butter before adding flour if you want the flavour to carry.
- CucumbersUse straight field cucumbers rather than the thin-skinned English kind, which collapse. Halve lengthwise, scoop with a teaspoon, and parboil 3-4 minutes only — they finish in the oven.
- Buttered crumbsOne-third cup butter per cup of dried crumbs is right; melt the butter and toss so every crumb is coated, which is what makes them brown rather than scorch.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 375F for 20-25 minutes, and go by the cucumbers: soft, still holding their shape, crumbs golden. Half an hour is the outside limit.
- Yield and servingTwo filled halves make a plate. The recipe leaves the quantity open ("the required number of cucumbers"), so scale the sauce and fish to the cucumbers you have. The "lemon point" is a wedge.
Stuffed cucumbers belong to a turn-of-the-century American fashion for serving food inside a hollowed vegetable — tomatoes, peppers, onions and cucumbers all appear this way in the household magazines of the 1890s and 1900s, when a dish's appearance on the plate carried real weight. Cooked cucumber was itself long established in English-language cooking: eighteenth-century cookery books give cucumbers stewed and buttered. The faint curry powder is of its period too, reaching American cream sauces as a single seasoning tin rather than as a spice tradition. The recipe is signed by a contributor, Anne Warner, the sort of attribution common in collections assembled from readers' and named writers' contributions.