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Halibut à la Martin
Clean two slices chicken halibut and cut into eight fillets. Season with salt, brush over with lemon juice and roll. Arrange on a tin plate covered with cheesecloth, fold cheesecloth over fillets, and cook in steamer fifteen minutes. Remove to serving dish, garnish with small shrimps, and pour around sauce, following directions for Normandy Sauce, omitting Sauterne, and seasoning to taste with grated cheese and Madeira.
Fillets of Fish à la Bement Prepare and cook fish same as for Halibut à la Martin. Insert tip of small lobster claw in each fillet, and garnish with a thin slice of canned mushroom sprinkled with parsley and a thin circular slice of truffle. Serve with Lobster Sauce III. Remove meat from a one and one-half pound lobster and cut claw meat in cubes. Cover remaining meat and body bones with cold water. Add one-half small onion, sprig of parsley, bit of bay leaf, and one-fourth teaspoon peppercorns, and cook until stock is reduced to one cup. Melt three tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually the stock; then add one-half cup heavy cream and yolks two eggs. Season with salt, lemon juice, and paprika; then add lobster cubes.
A steamed fillet dish from the era when hotel cooking meant a French sauce and a decorative garnish. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings and the cross-references need translating.
- "Chicken halibut"A small young halibut, usually given as roughly 10-20 lb, sold in cross-cut steaks. Two steaks boned and split give the eight fillets the recipe calls for; no yield is stated, but eight fillets suggests about four servings.
- Cut the steaming timeFifteen minutes will overcook rolled fillets of this thickness into dry flakes. Steam 6-8 minutes, until the flesh is just opaque at the centre of the roll and reads about 130-135F.
- The cheeseclothIt is there so the rolls can be lifted out intact without breaking. A perforated steamer insert lined with parchment or cloth does the same job; secure each roll with a toothpick before it goes in.
- Normandy Sauce, minus the wineClassically a fish velouté finished with egg yolks and cream, and the instruction to omit the Sauterne implies the book's version contains wine. Substituting Madeira and grated cheese is the whole point of the variation, so use a dry Madeira rather than a sweet one and add the cheese off the heat.
- Egg yolks in the sauceBoth sauces here are thickened with yolks after the roux has taken the stock. Once the yolks go in the sauce must not boil or it will curdle; hold it below a simmer and finish it just before serving.
- Lobster Sauce IIIThe stock, made from the body bones and the remaining meat, is cooked down to one cup, which is what carries the flavour. A 1 1/2 lb lobster gives enough claw meat for the cubes and plenty of body and shell for the stock.
- Canned mushrooms and truffleAt the turn of the century canned button mushrooms were the reliable year-round option and a thin slice of black truffle was a standard garnish. Fresh sautéed mushrooms are better now; the truffle can simply be left out without harming the dish.
- Small shrimpsThe garnish means the tiny cooked shrimp sold peeled by the pound, not large prawns. Add them warm at the last moment so they do not toughen.
Fannie Farmer's fish dishes include a number named for people — à la Martin, à la Bement — a convention often traced to restaurant and hotel menus of the 1880s and 90s, where a chef or a patron's name attached to a fillet-and-sauce combination seems to have served as shorthand for a specific garnish rather than a distinct technique. Who Martin and Bement were is not recorded in the book, and such names were frequently local or house inventions that vanished with the kitchens that used them. What the pair does show is the structure of American genteel cooking at the turn of the century: a plain piece of fish, gently steamed rather than fried, and then dressed with a French mother sauce, imported fortified wine, canned mushrooms and truffle — dishes that aspire to the manner of a Continental hotel.