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Halibut à la Rarebit
Sprinkle two small slices halibut with salt, pepper, and lemon juice; then brush over with melted butter, place in dripping-pan on greased fish-sheet, and bake twelve minutes. Remove to hot platter for serving, and pour over it a Welsh Rarebit.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know Farmer's Welsh rarebit and her baked-fish method. The whole dish stands or falls on not overcooking the halibut, which is very lean and goes dry and cottony within a minute or two of doneness.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given; the recipe says only "bake twelve minutes." A hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 425-450F, will suit steaks about an inch thick in that time. Judge by the flesh: it should be just opaque through and part reluctantly rather than flaking apart.
- "Two small slices halibut"Cross-cut steaks rather than fillets; two of them, so the dish serves two. No weight is given. Thicker centre-cut steaks will need a few minutes more, so judge by doneness rather than the clock.
- Dripping-pan and fish-sheetThe dripping-pan is a shallow roasting pan. The fish-sheet was a perforated tin or wire sheet that let you lift the cooked fish out whole; a sheet of oiled parchment or a flat spatula does the same job, and matters here because halibut steaks fall apart when moved.
- The rarebitFarmer's rarebit is cheese melted with butter, seasoned with mustard, salt and cayenne, moistened with ale and bound with a beaten egg. Make it while the fish bakes and hold it warm off direct heat -- cheese sauces separate if they are allowed to boil or to sit over a burner.
- SequenceHave the rarebit finished before the fish comes out, not the other way round. Fish held on a hot platter for the five minutes it takes to melt cheese will carry on cooking and dry out.
- SeasoningThe salt, pepper and lemon go on shortly before baking rather than an hour ahead; a long salting draws moisture from the surface and firms the flesh more than you want here. Keep the salt light, since the rarebit brings its own from the cheese and mustard.
- ServingRich enough that a plain accompaniment is best -- boiled potatoes, a green vegetable, and a wedge of lemon to cut the cheese.
Welsh rarebit poured over something other than toast turns up fairly often in late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery, when a savoury cheese sauce could be used as a dressing for eggs, vegetables and fish. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book works largely on this logic: master a small set of sauces and rarebits, then attach them to whatever the fish market or larder yields, which is why the recipe here is two sentences long and simply refers you elsewhere for the sauce. Halibut was a natural candidate in Boston, where the New England halibut fishery was a significant nineteenth-century trade, and the fish's firm, lean, mild flesh takes cream and cheese sauces in a way that oilier fish does not. The name "rarebit" is generally traced to an eighteenth-century alteration of "Welsh rabbit", said to have been a joke term for cheese as the meat of those who had none, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented; Farmer herself uses the politer spelling, as the title of this recipe shows.