Salmon Turbot
Flake the fish, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Make a dressing of one-third cup of butter, three tablespoons of flour and one pint of milk. When cool add two beaten eggs. Season with a little finely minced parsley and a few drops of lemon juice. In a baking dish put alternate layers of fish and sauce. Cover with buttered crumbs and brown. -Mrs James Wilcox.
A gratin of cooked salmon layered with a thick egg-enriched white sauce. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a roux sauce and gives no quantity of fish at all, so a few decisions are left to you.
- How much fishThe original never says. A pint of milk sauce with a third cup of butter and 3 tablespoons flour will comfortably carry about 2 lb of cooked, flaked salmon — two 14- to 15-oz cans, drained and bones and skin removed, or the flesh of a poached 2 1/2 lb piece. Serves six as a main course.
- The nameNo turbot is involved. "Turbot" here appears to describe the style of dish — fish baked in a cream sauce — rather than the fish itself; the name shows up on similar salmon and halibut dishes in American books of the period. Treat this as a salmon gratin.
- Cool the sauce before the eggsThis is the hinge. Two beaten eggs stirred into a hot roux sauce will scramble into threads. Let the sauce drop to about body temperature, or temper the eggs with a ladle of it first, then combine.
- Sauce consistencyThree tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk gives a fairly loose sauce; the eggs are what set it in the oven. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding milk so the flour loses its raw taste, and season it more assertively than seems necessary — flaked salmon absorbs a lot of salt.
- OvenThe recipe only says "brown" and gives no oven instruction. Bake at 375F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre is set and the crumbs are golden. If the crumbs colour first, finish under the broiler for a minute.
- Buttered crumbsToss about a cup of dry breadcrumbs with 2 tablespoons melted butter until every crumb is coated. Dry crumbs scattered on top without butter will scorch rather than brown.
- Canned salmonIf you use canned salmon, taste before salting the fish, since it is packed with salt. The soft vertebrae can be mashed into the flake or discarded as you prefer.
Layered fish-and-sauce bakes like this were a mainstay of late nineteenth-century American cookery because they solved two problems at once: they stretched an expensive protein with milk, flour and butter, and they used up cooked fish left from an earlier meal. The growing availability of canned Pacific salmon over the later decades of the century — canning was already underway from the 1860s and expanded through the 1870s and 1880s — made the dish year-round and inland, and recipes titled "salmon turbot" appear in community and magazine cookbooks of the era with the fish name detached from the flatfish it once meant.