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Halibut Rarebit
Marinate a cup of cooked halibut, flaked, with one tablespoonful of olive oil, a few drops of onion juice, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of paprica. Make a sauce of two tablespoonfuls, each, of butter and flour, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt and half a cup, each, of chicken stock and cream. Add twothirds a cup of grated cheese and the halibut. Serve, as soon as the fish is hot and the cheese melted, on the untoasted side of bread toasted on one side.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the rarebit was the fashionable late-evening food. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: the cheese goes in off the boil and the fish is already cooked.
- The hinge: never let the cheese boilAdd the grated cheese and fish to the finished sauce over the lowest possible heat, or off the flame entirely, and stir only until melted. Cheese sauce held at a simmer breaks into oily strings and grit.
- Cooked halibutThe recipe assumes leftover poached or baked fish. A cup of flakes is roughly 6 oz of cooked halibut, from about 8 oz raw; poach it in salted water or stock for 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness, until it just separates.
- Onion juiceA period standby, made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve. The recipe asks only for a few drops, so a very small quantity -- or the merest trace of finely grated onion -- is the intended strength.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "grated cheese" in an American book of this period most likely meant a firm factory cheese of the cheddar type, and a cheddar is the nearest modern equivalent. Two-thirds of a cup grated is roughly 2 to 3 oz.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour with one cup of liquid gives a thick coating sauce. Cook the roux a minute before adding the stock and cream so it does not taste of raw flour.
- PapricaSimply paprika, spelled as it often was then. Sweet Hungarian paprika is closer to the period product than smoked paprika, which did not figure in these books.
- The toastToasting bread on one side and serving it soft side up appears in a number of period rarebit recipes; the soft face takes up the sauce while the crisp underside gives the slice some support. Under a broiler this means toasting one side only, then flipping the slice onto the plate.
- YieldEnough for two as a supper dish or four small servings. Like other cheese sauces it does not hold or reheat well, so serve it as soon as it is made.
Rarebits multiplied enormously in American cookbooks around 1900, when the chafing dish became a middle-class fixture and cooking at the table was both entertainment and a way to feed people after the theatre without troubling a servant. The original Welsh rabbit is cheese on toast, usually moistened with ale; by this point the name had loosened into a formula for anything bound in a cheese sauce and served on toast, with oyster, lobster and crab versions all in print. Halibut here is the thrifty variation, a way of using a cup of cooked fish left from an earlier meal, and the marinade of oil, lemon and onion juice is doing the work of freshening flavour that reheating alone would flatten.