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Baked Fillet of Halibut
2 slices of halibut cut from middle of fish salt, pepper, lemon juice, melted butter 2 cups oyster stuffing Wash and wipe fish. Place one slice on a buttered fish sheet, brush with melted butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, cover with oyster stuffing. Place second slice on top of oysters, season, and brush with butter. Bake forty minutes, basting frequently with melted butter, turning pan often in order that the fish may be uniformly browned. Remove to hot platter; garnish with potato balls, parsley, and lemon; Hollandaise, tomato, or Béchamel sauce. つ 6 medium-sized trout olive oil or melted butter SAUTÉD FISH Sautéd Trout cornmeal, salt and pepper 2 tablespoons lard or butter Wash and wipe fish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in olive oil, roll in cornmeal, and sauté until brown, and crisp in butter or lard. Drain on brown paper. Serve on hot platter, and garnish with lemon and cress. All kinds of small fish may be cooked in the same manner. 6 fish fillets 1 teaspoon mustard
A sandwich of two halibut steaks with oyster stuffing between them, baked as one piece. The book gives no oven temperature, so the main work of modernising it is supplying the numbers.
- Oven temperatureLowney's assumes the cook knows her range. Bake at 400F; a moderate oven of 350F will take longer and dry the outer surfaces before the centre sets.
- The forty minutes is for thick steaksTwo crosscut steaks from the middle of a large halibut are each an inch or more thick, and with stuffing between them the assembly is close to three inches. Supermarket halibut steaks are often 3/4 inch; the whole thing may be done in 25 minutes. Check the centre of the fish for doneness, and check the oyster stuffing separately to be sure it is hot through.
- "Fish sheet"A perforated metal sheet with handles that sat inside the roasting pan, so a whole cooked fish could be lifted out unbroken. A parchment sling or a wire rack set in a shallow pan does the same job.
- Oyster stuffingStandard for the period: soft breadcrumbs, butter, chopped parsley, seasoning, and shucked oysters with a little of their liquor. Chop the oysters roughly so the two steaks lie flat, and keep the mixture on the dry side or the liquid will steam the fish rather than let it brown.
- Tie or skewer itThe recipe never says so, but the top slice slides. Two or three loops of kitchen twine, or metal skewers pushed through both steaks, keep the sandwich together for basting and for the transfer to the platter.
- Basting and turning the panFrequent basting mattered in a coal range with hot and cool sides. In an even electric oven a single turn halfway through is enough; brush with butter twice.
- Potato ballsPotato scooped with a small round cutter and boiled or roasted -- a garnish, not a side. Small new potatoes are the easy substitute.
- YieldTwo middle-cut steaks plus stuffing serves four to six, depending on the size of the fish.
- The stray text at the endThe lines about trout and the "6 fish fillets, 1 teaspoon mustard" belong to following recipes that ran on in the original page. They are not part of the halibut.
Halibut steaks stuffed with oysters appears in cookbooks of the late nineteenth century, when Atlantic halibut was landed in quantity at Boston and Gloucester and oysters were cheap enough to be treated as a bulking ingredient rather than a luxury. Lowney's Cook Book, issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company as promotional literature, is otherwise a conventional Boston-school manual, and its fish chapter follows the Fannie Farmer pattern closely: a whole baked fish, a stuffed one, a sauted one, each with a prescribed garnish and a choice of three sauces. The advice to keep turning the pan suggests a cook working over a wood or coal firebox, where the side of the oven nearest the fire ran markedly hotter than the far side, though such ranges remained in use well into the twentieth century.