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Baked Halibut with Lobster Sauce
Clean a piece of halibut weighing three pounds. Cut gashes in top, and insert a narrow strip of fat salt pork in each gash. Place in dripping-pan on fish-sheet, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge with flour. Cover bottom of pan with water, add sprig of parsley, slice of onion, two slices carrot cut in pieces, and bit of bay leaf. Bake one hour, basting with one-fourth cup butter and the liquor in pan. Serve with Lobster Sauce.
A plain oven-baked fish with two period habits worth understanding: the fish is larded with salt pork for fat, and the pan liquid doubles as a light court bouillon for basting. The timing is the part to ignore.
- Oven temperatureFarmer gives none, as the book assumes a coal range and a cook who knows her fire. Baked fish of this size wants a hot-ish oven, about 400F.
- The hour is too longA 3 lb centre cut of halibut at 400F is done in roughly 35 to 45 minutes, at an internal temperature of 130 to 135F, carried to 140F off the heat. An hour produces the dry, flaking, cottony halibut that gave the fish its reputation.
- Fish-sheet and dripping-panThe fish-sheet is a perforated metal sheet with handles, laid in the pan so the cooked fish can be lifted out whole. A rack set in a roasting pan, or a double sling of parchment, does the same job.
- Larding with salt porkHalibut is lean, and the pork strips were the fat. Rinse the salt pork if it is very salty, or use unsmoked bacon or pancetta, and go easy on the added salt afterwards.
- The pan liquidWater plus parsley, onion, carrot and bay is a rudimentary court bouillon. It steams the underside and flavours the basting liquid. Use enough to film the pan, about a cup, and top it up if it dries; scorched aromatics will taint the butter.
- Dredging with flourThe flour is there to brown and to hold the butter on the surface. It only works if the fish is patted thoroughly dry first.
- Lobster SauceIn this book that means a white sauce of butter, flour and milk, with lobster meat and coral added. Look it up in the sauce chapter or use any modern lobster or shellfish cream sauce; the dish is not much without it.
- YieldThree pounds on the bone serves about six.
Halibut was a familiar market fish in late nineteenth-century Boston, landed by the New England schooner fleet in fish that could run past 200 pounds, so a three-pound piece was simply a slice cut from a much larger animal. Larding lean fish with salt pork was a common American practice, the same kitchen logic that barded a rabbit or a grouse.