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Halibut Salad (Steam a thick slice of chicken)
Steam a thick slice of chicken halibut, until the flesh separates easily from the bone. Remove the skin and bones without disturbing the shape of the
The text on this page breaks off mid-sentence, so what survives is the fish preparation rather than the finished salad. Even so, the method is the part that matters: a steamed slice of halibut, boned while still whole, is the base for a cold fish salad dressed at the table.
- "Chicken halibut"Not chicken at all — the market term for a small young halibut, roughly 10 to 20 lb, prized for finer, whiter flesh than the huge old fish. Any halibut steak an inch to an inch and a half thick will do; a center-cut steak with the bone in holds its shape best.
- Steaming time and donenessA steak of this thickness will take somewhere in the region of 10 to 15 minutes over simmering water, depending on how thick the slice is. "Until the flesh separates easily from the bone" is the recipe's own cue, and halibut is very lean, so it turns dry and cottony if pushed much past it.
- Keeping the shapeThe instruction to remove skin and bones "without disturbing the shape" is the hinge. Let the fish cool to warm before handling, then lift the two fillets away from the center bone in one piece each, working with a thin flexible knife rather than a fork. A hot steak falls into shreds.
- What the missing text almost certainly saidWhat the missing text may have said -- Fish salads of this period were often finished by chilling the boned fish thoroughly, laying it on lettuce, and masking it with mayonnaise or a boiled dressing, sometimes with capers, chopped cucumber, or hard-boiled egg. What this particular recipe went on to say cannot be recovered from the fragment.
- Chill properlyCold fish salad needs the fish cold before it meets mayonnaise, not merely cooled. Refrigerate the boned pieces covered for at least two hours, and dress no more than an hour before serving so the mayonnaise does not thin out from the fish's moisture.
- YieldA thick steak of about 1 1/2 lb yields roughly 1 lb of picked flesh, enough for four as a first course or three as a lunch salad.
- SourcingAtlantic halibut has been severely depleted since the nineteenth century and is generally best avoided; Pacific halibut is the ordinary market fish today and behaves much the same here.
Halibut was a mainstay of the late nineteenth-century Northeast, landed by the Gloucester and Boston fleets — which by then were working distant banks — and sold in thick steaks that were treated more like meat than like fish — steamed, baked, broiled, and above all served cold. The cold fish salad, masked in mayonnaise and set on lettuce, was a fixture of the ladies' luncheon and the summer supper table in the era this book comes from, when a bowl of dressing did the work that a hot kitchen could not be asked to do in August. The halibut is a neutral, firm, agreeably pale foundation, and the cook's reputation rested on what she poured over it.