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Halibut au Lit
Wipe two slices chicken halibut, each weighing threefourths pound. Cut one piece in eight fillets, sprinkle with salt and lemon juice, roll and fasten with small wooden skewers. Cook over boiling water. Cut remaining slice in pieces about the size and shape of scallops. Dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. Arrange a steamed fillet in centre of each fish-plate, place on top of each a cooked mushroom cap, and put fried fish at both right and left of fillet. Serve with Mushroom Sauce, and garnish with watercress and radishes cut in fancy shapes.
Mushroom Sauce. Melt three tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, one cup Fish Stock. When boiling-point is reached, add one-half cup cream, three mushroom caps, sliced, and one tablespoon Sauterne. Season with salt and pepper. The Fish Stock should be made from skin and bones
A composed plate from the era when a single fish was expected to appear in two textures on the same dish. Nothing here is difficult, but the two cooking methods have to be timed so the steamed rolls and the fried pieces arrive together.
- Chicken halibutNot poultry: the trade name for a small halibut, generally a fish of a few pounds up to about ten, which yields thinner, more tender steaks than the great fish. Ask for halibut steaks of about three-quarters of a pound each, or substitute thick cod or hake loin cut to the same size.
- Quantity and yieldTwo steaks at three-quarters pound each, so about a pound and a half of fish. One steak is cut into eight rolls and one roll goes on each plate; the recipe gives no stated number of servings.
- "Cook over boiling water"Steam, not boil. Set the rolls on a plate or rack over simmering water, cover, and give them about 8 to 10 minutes, until the flesh is just opaque at the centre. Halibut is lean and turns dry and cottony within a minute or two of that point.
- Rolling the filletsCutting one 12 oz steak into eight rolls means slicing the flesh off the bone and then into thin strips. Small bamboo skewers or cocktail sticks do what the wooden skewers did; soak them so they slide out cleanly.
- Deep fatNo temperature is given. 375F is right for crumbed fish of this size, two to three minutes to a deep gold. Below about 350F the double crumb coating soaks fat; above 390F it colours before the fish sets.
- Crumbs, egg, and crumbsThe order is literal and worth following: a dry first coat gives the beaten egg something to grip, and the second crumbing then holds. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh.
- Fish stockThe trailing instruction is the practical one. Simmer the skin, bones and trimmings with a little onion and a bay leaf for no more than 20 to 30 minutes; fish bones turn bitter and gluey if cooked longer. One cup is all the sauce needs.
- SauterneA white wine; in American books of this date the unaccented spelling was applied loosely, to sweet French Sauternes and to generic domestic whites alike. One tablespoon goes in the sauce, and any dry-to-off-dry white will do the same job of lifting the cream and butter.
- The sauceA velouté: cook the butter and flour a minute before adding the stock, add the liquid gradually off a hard boil to avoid lumps, and hold the cream back until the base has thickened.
Au lit is French for "in bed" — the steamed fillet lies under its mushroom cap with fried pieces banked on either side, a small tableau on the plate. Fanciful French plate names of this kind were common in American cookery schools around 1900, when the vocabulary of the hotel kitchen carried real prestige. The double treatment of one fish, steamed and crumbed-and-fried, shows the same instinct: it turns a plain white fish into something that reads as a course.