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Olives
A bunch of radishes. 2 cucumbers.
French dressing.
Method. Remove the skin and bone from the halibut, thus securing eight fillets. Season with salt, pepper, onion and lemon juice. Chop the lobster meat fine; melt the butter, cook in it the flour and seasonings, add the cream and lobster stock, and, when cooked, stir in the chopped lobster. When cool spread upon one side of the fillets, roll up the fillets and fasten with wooder toothpicks that have been dipped in melted butter.
Bake on a fish-sheet about fifteen minutes, basting with butter melted in hot water. Set a plain border-mould in ice water; decorate the bottom and sides with pim-olas or gherkins cut in slices and dipped in half-set aspic; cover the decoration on the bottom with aspic, and, when set and the decorations on the side are "fixed" in place, arrange on the aspic the cold fillets of fish and fill the mould with more aspic. When cold turn from the mould and fill the centre with diced cucumbers and sliced radishes dressed with French dressing. Pass mayonnaise or French dressing in a separate dish. Surround the aspic with shredded lettuce if desired.
This is a moulded fish aspic — lobster-stuffed halibut fillets baked, chilled, then set in a border of jelly with a cucumber-radish salad in the middle. The printed page has lost most of its ingredient list, so read the method first and build your own quantities from it.
- The list is incompleteOnly the radishes, cucumbers and French dressing survive above the method. The rest has to be guessed at: something like 2 lb halibut cut into the eight thin fillets the method calls for, the meat of a 1-1.5 lb lobster, a thick white sauce of roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour with 1/2 cup cream and 1/2 cup lobster stock, and enough clarified fish aspic (about a quart) to fill the mould. None of these quantities can be recovered from the page.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for pimiento-stuffed green olives. Ordinary stuffed Spanish olives, sliced crosswise, give the same red-and-green rounds.
- Aspic in practiceTurn-of-the-century aspic was a reduced fish or veal stock set with gelatine, granulated or sheet. Use a strong, clear fish stock with about 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin per 2 cups liquid — firm enough to unmould, not rubbery. "Half-set" means syrupy and just beginning to hold, which is what makes the olive slices stay put.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given on the page. Bake the rolled fillets at about 400F for the fifteen minutes specified; they are thin, so check early, but take the fish to 145F internal, since it will afterwards be chilled and served cold.
- Fish-sheet and bastingA fish-sheet was a perforated metal plate that let you lift baked fish out whole. A parchment-lined sheet pan works. The "butter melted in hot water" is simply a thin basting liquid that keeps the surface from drying without browning it.
- ToothpicksThe recipe gives no reason for dipping them in melted butter. Count them in and count them out before the fillets go into the jelly, where they become invisible.
- French dressingIn this period that means a plain vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar; check the book's own recipe for its proportions. Dress the cucumber and radish at the last moment or they weep into the jelly.
- Keep it coldA fish aspic is a low-acid, high-protein dish held at room temperature for as long as it takes to serve. Chill it until the moment it goes to table and do not let it stand out more than an hour.
- YieldEight fillets in a ring mould serve six to eight as a first course or a light summer lunch, with the salad in the centre and extra dressing passed.
Moulded aspics like this one belong to the high summer of American middle-class entertaining around 1900, when clear gelatin was the fashionable way to show off cold food — Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties came out of the same Boston Cooking School world as Fannie Farmer, and its readers were being taught to treat a luncheon dish as a piece of construction. Commercial granulated gelatin, sold in packets from the 1890s, made a jelly that had previously required hours of boiling calves' feet into something a cook could set up in an afternoon, and the border-mould with a salad in its centre became a standard shape. The pimiento-stuffed olive, often said to be a fairly recent Spanish import and marketed in the United States under names like "pimola," was prized less for flavour than for the neat red-and-green disc it made when sliced — decoration you could see through the jelly. The garbled page here, with the ingredients of one recipe attached to the method of another, is a common artifact of these densely set cookbooks, where recipes ran together on the page.