Halibut
Boil one pound halibut, then chop it very fine and add eight eggs well beaten; pepper and salt to taste, then one cup butter.
Put it in a stewpan and cook until the eggs are done sufficiently. Serve very hot on toast.--Miss F. N.
Halibut.
Halibut should be cut in slices of four pounds each. If to be boiled cover with salt water, and skim often; drain off and serve with butter sauce. If baked or fried, garnish with horseradish and serve with melted butter.
Two entries have run together here: a scrambled-egg-and-halibut dish credited to a contributor, and a short general note on cooking halibut steaks. Read the second sentence onward as separate guidance, not a continuation of the first recipe.
- The run-on attribution"--Miss F. N. Halibut." is a printing collision: the contributor's initials are followed immediately by the heading of the next entry. Nobody was named Miss Halibut.
- Cut the butterOne cup of butter to one pound of fish and eight eggs is several times what the dish needs and will separate into a greasy pool. Two to three tablespoons is enough to keep the eggs soft.
- Low heat is the hinge"Cook until the eggs are done sufficiently" over a brisk fire gives you dry curds weeping liquid. Keep the pan at low heat, stir constantly, and pull it off while the mixture is still glossy and slightly loose; residual heat finishes it.
- Cook the fish first, then flakePoach the pound of halibut until just opaque, no more than 8-10 minutes for a thick piece, and flake rather than chop to a paste. Overcooked halibut turns fibrous and dry, and it will cook again in the eggs.
- Four-pound slicesThe instruction to cut halibut into four-pound slices reflects a fish that ran to 100 pounds and up and was sold in cross-cut sections for a large household. A modern steak of 6-8 ounces per person is the same cut at a workable scale.
- Salt water, and skimming"Cover with salt water" most likely means water salted for seasoning rather than a strong brine; about a tablespoon of salt per quart suits. The scum that wants skimming is coagulated albumen from the fish.
- Butter sauceThe period's "butter sauce" is flour, butter and water or fish liquor cooked to a light binding sauce. Period books often used "melted butter" for that same thickened sauce rather than for plain butter, so it is not safe to assume the two phrases a line apart mean different things.
- YieldThe egg dish serves four generously on toast, or six as a first course.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is why this page reads the way it does: dozens of separate hands, set close together, with the occasional heading swallowed by the signature above it. Halibut itself is a northern fish, and its appearance in a Virginia collection points to the reach of the ice trade and the rail network by the 1870s, which put New England fish counters within a few days of inland Southern tables. The name is generally traced to Middle English hali (holy) and butte (flatfish), a fish eaten on holy days when meat was forbidden. Combining flaked cooked fish with beaten eggs and serving it on toast was standard nineteenth-century thrift cookery, the same logic behind kedgeree and creamed codfish: yesterday's boiled fish reappearing at breakfast or supper in a form nobody had to identify.