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Halibut Salad (For evening company or fish)
(For evening company, or fish course at a dinner party.) INGREDIENTS.
A slice of chicken halibut, 3 inches thick. 3 cups of cooked peas.
French dressing.
Hard-boiled eggs. 3 slices of pickled beet.
1 teaspoonful of gelatine.
Jelly mayonnaise, or green butter.
Heart leaves of lettuce. 2 olives.
Method. - Prepare the eggs and fasten to the plate as in salmon salad. Dip diamond-shaped
This is a composed, molded salad from the era when a fish course was expected to arrive looking architectural. The text as printed breaks off mid-assembly, so treat it as a set of components and a plan rather than a full method.
- The page is incompleteThe instructions stop at "Dip diamond-shaped" — possibly croutons or bread points dipped in green butter, or beet diamonds dipped in the gelatine, though the surviving text gives no way to tell. Anyone building this will have to finish the garnishing scheme themselves, using the salmon salad elsewhere in the book as the template the author refers to.
- Chicken halibutNot a mixed dish: a "chicken halibut" is simply a small halibut, prized for finer flesh — the trade term's weight cut-off varied. A steak 3 inches thick is a substantial piece, though yield and number served will depend on the fish; the recipe states neither. Pacific halibut is the sustainable choice today; Atlantic halibut stocks are depleted.
- Cooking the fishThe recipe gives no cooking instruction; period practice would be to poach the steak in salted, acidulated water and cool it in the liquid. Halibut is lean and turns cottony fast, so watch it closely — the USDA recommends cooking fish to 145F, though many cooks pull it lower and let carryover finish. Overcooked halibut will not be rescued by dressing.
- PeasThree cups of cooked peas would have meant fresh shelled peas, boiled, or canned peas out of season. Frozen peas, thawed and briefly blanched, hold their color well for the plating this salad depends on.
- Jelly mayonnaiseMayonnaise set with the teaspoon of gelatine so it will coat and hold a shape. One teaspoon of modern granulated gelatine softened in a tablespoon of cold water, melted, and whisked warm into about a cup of mayonnaise gives a coating consistency. Work quickly; it sets as it cools and cannot be re-warmed without breaking the emulsion.
- Green butterButter pounded with cooked spinach, parsley or watercress and pressed through a sieve, used as a piping paste for garnish. It is a garnish medium, not a sauce, and must be kept cold and firm to hold the shapes it is forced into.
- French dressingFrench dressing at this date meant oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, mixed fresh — not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name later came to mean in America. Proportions varied from book to book. The fragment does not say how the dressing is used.
- Serving coldEverything here is assembled cold and holds badly. Build it no more than an hour or two ahead, keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes out, and do not let a gelatine-coated fish salad sit at room temperature on a buffet.
Salads like this belong to the high period of the American cooking-school movement, when a salad was as much a piece of table decoration as a dish, and cold fish masked in jellied mayonnaise, ringed with peas and studded with hard-boiled egg and beet cutouts, was standard company fare. The book instructs the cook to prepare the eggs "as in salmon salad," a reminder that these composed platters were built from a shared vocabulary of parts — aspic, green butter, mayonnaise stiffened with a little gelatine — that a reader was expected to have already learned earlier in the volume. Halibut suited the purpose because its firm white flakes hold their shape under a coating and photograph well, so to speak, on a chilled platter; "chicken halibut," the trade term for the smaller and finer-textured fish, was a mark of quality in Boston fish markets of the period.