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Halibut Au Gratin
1½ cups cooked halibut 3 hard boiled eggs 1½ cups cream sauce 1 cup cracker crumbs 4 tablespoons butter Pick the halibut into small pieces; crush the yolks of the eggs and chop the whites into small pieces. Stir fish and eggs into the hot cream sauce. Fill ramekins with the mixture; cover with crumbs and bits of butter and brown in the oven.
A tidy way to use leftover poached fish, from the era when every well-appointed household had a chafing dish. Despite its place in that chapter, the browning step needs an oven or broiler.
- The cream sauceThe recipe assumes you already know a medium white sauce: about 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 1½ cups milk, cooked until it coats a spoon and seasoned to taste. It should be thick enough to hold the fish in suspension, not pourable.
- Have the sauce hotThe fish and eggs are already cooked, so this is an assembly and a browning, not a cooking. Stir them into hot sauce and fill the ramekins hot, or the centers will be tepid by the time the crumbs color.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only "brown in the oven." Nothing needs to cook through, so a hot oven of around 425F for 10-12 minutes will do, or run them under the broiler for 3-4 minutes; too low a heat only dries the fish and leaves the crumbs pale.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs would most often have come from soda or common crackers, generally coarser and less salty than modern saltines. Crush them to gravel, not dust, and if you prefer more even browning, toss them with the melted butter rather than dotting it on as the recipe directs.
- The halibutAbout 8-10 ounces of cooked fish gives 1½ cups picked. Poach in salted water or milk just until it flakes, then cool before picking; overcooked halibut turns cottony and no amount of sauce hides it. Atlantic halibut stocks are depleted, so Pacific halibut, cod or haddock are the practical substitutes.
- EggsThree hard-boiled eggs to 1½ cups fish is a high proportion by modern taste. Two is plenty if you want the halibut to lead.
- YieldFills four standard 6-ounce ramekins as a first course or light supper dish, two as a main.
Au gratin is one of those French terms that Anglo-American cookbooks absorbed and then slowly misread: the word is generally traced to gratter, to scrape, and is often said to have described originally the crust scraped from the dish rather than a cheese sauce, which is why this recipe browns crumbs and butter with no cheese in sight. The dish belongs to a genuine fashion of the 1890s and 1900s, when the alcohol-lamp chafing dish stood on sideboards in middle-class homes and supported a whole literature of creamed, scalloped and ramekin dishes made at the table after the theatre or at Sunday supper. Halibut suited the format because it poaches firm and picks into neat flakes rather than collapsing, and because a cooked fillet left from an earlier meal was exactly the kind of remnant a thrifty kitchen was expected to redeem. The individual ramekin, sold in sets and much advertised in the period, was itself part of the appeal.