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Fish or Poissons: Tartare (Filets de saumon la Tartare)
Filets de saumon à la Tartare are fried fillets, served with Tartare sauce ; à la Ravigote, with Ravigote sauce. à la Maintenon-fillets broiled in paper cases. à la Suède-fillets baked in paper cases with tomato sauce, and garnished with cucumber, beetroot and tarragon. à la Richelieu-fillets served on a border of salmon forcemeat, masked with a purée of tomatoes, and garnished with crayfish and truffles.
Mazarine de saumon is a steamed mould of salmon forcemeat. It may be garnished with prawns, or served with Cardinal sauce. As Pain de saumon à la Russe, it is served cold with horseradish sauce. Mayonnaise de saumon. Pieces of cold salmon, with lettuce or other salad, and Mayonnaise sauce.
A short page of salmon dishes, mostly fillets, with the cold preparations gathered at the end. The hot ones depend on paper cases and the cold ones on hand-made mayonnaise.
- Tartare sauce, made not boughtMayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins and herbs, built in a bowl with a whisk. The book assumes it, and so do the Ravigote and the Mayonnaise entries lower down. Every one of these dishes stands or falls on that sauce.
- Paper cases are parchmentEn caisse and en papillote mean cooking in buttered paper, which steams the fish in its own moisture and holds the shape. Baking parchment does it better than the book’s paper did, and the parcel should be opened at the table rather than in the kitchen.
- Cook it lessEvery method here takes the salmon to firm and opaque, and the sauces are partly there to carry a fish that has gone past its best. Take the same fillets to just set in the middle, keep the sauces, and you have the better dish by a wide margin.
- Salmon forcemeatThe Mazarine and the Pain de saumon are moulds of pounded raw salmon with cream, steamed gently. Blitzed cold with cream and a little egg white, this is a mousseline, and it is the one technique on the page worth learning properly.
- Cardinal sauce is red from shellfishNot from tomato or paprika: the colour and scent come from lobster or shellfish butter. The crayfish garnish on the à la Richelieu is of a piece with it, shellfish used to dress a fish dish.
The cold dishes at the foot of the page, the salmon loaf with horseradish and the mayonnaise with lettuce, are there for a structural reason. A dinner of many courses, out of one small kitchen, at a fixed hour, needs dishes that were finished hours earlier and come up cold. Cold salmon was the dependable one, and the book sets it down in a single line as something that needs no explaining.