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Baked Halibut with Tomato Sauce
2 lbs. halibut 2 cups tomatoes 1 cup water 1 slice onion 3 cloves ½ tablespoon sugar 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour ¾ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook twenty minutes tomatoes, water, onion, cloves, and sugar. Melt butter, add flour, and stir into hot mixture. Add salt and pepper, cook ten minutes, and strain. Clean fish, put in baking-pan, pour around half the sauce, and bake thirty-five minutes, basting often. Remove to hot platter, pour around remaining sauce, and garnish with parsley.
A straightforward baked fish with a strained tomato velouté, from the era when a thickened sauce was expected to carry a plain piece of fish. The only real risk is overcooking.
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as "34 teaspoon," which is a mangled ¾ teaspoon. Season the sauce to taste at the end instead of trusting the figure.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; ranges of the period were judged by hand and by paper test. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a baked fish of this kind.
- Baking timeThirty-five minutes will dry out a modern halibut steak or fillet. A 2 lb thick center-cut piece is done at 10 minutes per inch of thickness, roughly 20-25 minutes, when the flesh reaches 130-135F and just separates into flakes. Check early.
- Tomatoes"2 cups tomatoes" in a book of this period most likely means canned or stewed tomatoes with their liquid rather than fresh diced. A 14-15 oz can is close enough.
- The sauce methodThe butter and flour are cooked to a roux, then stirred into the hot tomato mixture rather than the reverse. Whisk hard as you combine, or the flour will seize into lumps -- which is part of what the straining step is there to catch.
- StrainingDo not skip it. The whole point is to remove the onion slice, the three cloves, and the tomato skins and seeds, leaving a smooth pink sauce.
- BastingBasting a lean fish with tomato sauce is what keeps it from drying, so it matters more here than in a fatty fish. Spoon the pan sauce over every 8 minutes or so.
- YieldTwo pounds of halibut serves four generously, or five as one course among several.
Halibut was a familiar white fish of New England kitchens when this book was compiled in the 1890s, plain enough to bake in a simple pan. The tomato sauce here is a period hybrid: a French roux-thickened, strained sauce built on canned tomatoes, which by the 1890s were a reliable year-round pantry staple in American cities and had displaced much of the fresh-tomato cookery of a generation earlier. The pinch of sugar and the three cloves are the standard corrective of the day for canned tomato's acidity and tinny edge, a habit that survives in tomato soup recipes still.