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Broiled Chicken Halibut
Clean and broil as directed in Ways of Cooking Fish. Spread with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and garnish with slices of lemon cut in fancy shapes and sprinkled with paprika and parsley.
A three-line recipe that assumes you have already read the book's general directions for broiling fish. Here is what those directions contained and what needs adjusting.
- "Chicken halibut"Market usage for a small young halibut, with the cut-off variously given but generally somewhere around 20 lb, whose steaks are thinner and finer-grained than those from a full-grown fish. Any halibut steak 3/4 to 1 inch thick stands in.
- The broiling directionsThe recipe defers to the book's general fish-broiling section, which calls for a well-greased hinged wire broiler so the fish can be turned as a unit. Check the preliminaries (drying, seasoning, any flour dredge) against that page. The greasing is the hinge of the whole thing — halibut is lean and welds itself to bare metal.
- Heat and timeA coal range broiling oven or a bed of coals gave fierce direct heat. Use a modern broiler on high with the rack 4 inches below the element, or a hot grill; 4 to 6 minutes per side for a 1-inch steak.
- DonenessHalibut is very lean and goes dry and cottony fast. Pull it at 130-135F at the thickest point, or when the flesh has just lost its translucency at the centre bone.
- Butter afterwards, not beforeThe butter is spread on the cooked fish and melts into it as a sauce; it is not a basting fat. This recipe calls for plain butter, though the book's maitre d'hotel butter (softened butter worked with lemon juice and chopped parsley) is a common period accompaniment to broiled fish.
- The fancy lemonPeriod garnishing meant lemon slices notched or cut into points, then sprinkled with paprika and minced parsley, exactly as the text directs. Plain wedges do the same work at a modern table.
- YieldThe original gives none. Figure 6 to 8 oz of steak per person; two large steaks serve four.
Halibut was one of the great New England market fish of the late nineteenth century, landed in quantity by Gloucester and Boston schooners, and the cookbook it appears in — often identified as the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book — treats it the way a modern book treats salmon re of a plain dinner. "Chicken halibut" came out of the fish trade's vocabulary, one of a family of terms distinguishing small fish from large, and the name promised tenderness in the same way "spring lamb" did. Broiling over direct heat with a hinged wire broiler was the standard treatment for firm steaks and cutlets before gas ranges standardised the overhead grill; the garnish of notched lemon, paprika and parsley reflects the era's conviction that a plainly cooked dish still owed the table some decoration. Worth noting that Atlantic halibut stocks were already declining when this book was written and the species is now a poor choice on conservation grounds; Pacific halibut is the usual substitute.