Home › Sandwiches › Halibut-and-Lettuce Sandwiches
Halibut-and-Lettuce Sandwiches
Put a pound and a half of halibut, a slice of onion, a stalk of celery, four or five peppercorns, one teaspoonful of salt and one tablespoonful of lemon juice in boiling water, and cook, just below the boiling-point, ten or fifteen minutes, according to thickness. Remove bone and skin and rub the fish fine with a wooden spoon; add half a cup of thick cream, a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of white pepper and one tablespoonful of lemon juice.
Spread this mixture, when cold, on buttered slices of bread, put a lettuce leaf above the mixture, and spread a teaspoonful of mayonnaise or boiled salad dressing on the lettuce; finish with a slice of buttered bread and tie with ribbon.
A court-bouillon poach turned into a spread — straightforward, but the salt and the poaching temperature both need attention.
- Poach, do not boil"Just below the boiling-point" means water kept hot with the surface barely trembling rather than bubbling; in practice somewhere in the 175-190F range. A rolling boil squeezes moisture out of halibut and leaves it dry and fibrous, which is exactly the texture you cannot rescue once it is mashed.
- Timing by thicknessTen to fifteen minutes suits a thick centre-cut piece; a thinner steak will be done sooner. Pull it when the flesh just separates into flakes at the thickest point.
- SaltThe recipe adds a teaspoon to the poaching water and another to the finished mixture, on top of buttered bread and mayonnaise. Add the second teaspoon in stages and taste, especially if you use a salted commercial mayonnaise.
- Thick creamThis is heavy cream, around 36% fat. Light cream or half-and-half will loosen the spread and it will soak into the bread.
- Rubbing fineA wooden spoon against the side of a bowl gives a coarse, flaky paste, which is the point. A food processor will turn a pound and a half of poached halibut into gluey paste in about four seconds.
- Chill before spreadingThe instruction to use it cold is structural, not fussy — warm fish and cream will not hold on bread. Spread it straight from the refrigerator, and keep the assembled sandwiches cold until served.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pound and a half of fish, once boned and skinned, plus the half cup of cream, should give something over two cups of spread -- enough for roughly ten to twelve full sandwiches, or twice that halved for tea.
- Boiled dressingThe alternative named here is the period's cooked, egg-and-vinegar dressing, thinner and sharper than mayonnaise. Either works; the tang is there to cut the cream.
- The ribbonTying the sandwich with ribbon is tea-table presentation. If you trim the crusts, skip the ribbon or use kitchen twine, since a trimmed sandwich will not survive being cinched.
This comes from the era of the chafing-dish and afternoon tea at the turn of the twentieth century, when American cooking schools were codifying exactly this sort of light, composed food for luncheons and receptions. Halibut was then a familiar New England market fish, sold in thick steaks off the Atlantic banks, and cooked fish bound with cream was a standard way of stretching it into something that could be spread. The direction to "tie with ribbon" places the recipe firmly in the era of the ladies' luncheon rather than the lunch pail, food to be looked at as much as eaten. Boiled dressing, offered here as an equal alternative to mayonnaise, was still the ordinary American household dressing at the time; commercial jarred mayonnaise did not become a pantry staple until the following decades.