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Halibut Soup
¾ cup cold boiled halibut 1 pint milk 1 slice onion Blade of mace 3 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Rub fish through a sieve. Scald milk with onion and mace. Remove seasonings, and add fish. Bind with half the butter and flour cooked together. Add salt, pepper, and the remaining butter in small pieces.
A small, rich fish soup of the type Fannie Farmer grouped under "soups without stock" — thickened milk, flavoured aromatics, and cooked fish pounded to a purée. It comes together in about fifteen minutes once the halibut is cooked.
- Quantity of fishThe fish measure has lost its fraction in this printing; three-quarters of a cup of flaked cooked halibut is the amount that suits a pint of milk. That is on the order of 4 oz of cooked fish.
- Sieving the fish"Rub through a sieve" means forcing the cooked, flaked halibut through a fine-mesh strainer with the back of a spoon so no fibres remain. A food processor or blender does it faster, though it gives a slightly gluier texture; a few pulses is enough.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold whole as "blades" or ground. A blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon ground; if using ground, add it with the salt and pepper rather than scalding it, since it cannot be strained out.
- ScaldingBring the milk with the onion slice and mace just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, then hold it off the heat five to ten minutes to infuse. Boiling milk will catch on the pan and dull the flavour.
- "Bind with half the butter and flour"Cook 1 1/2 tablespoons butter with the 1 1/2 tablespoons flour to a pale roux, then whisk the hot milk into it — or whisk the roux into the milk off the boil. The remaining butter goes in at the end, off the heat, and should not be allowed to boil or the soup will look oily.
- Butter measurementThree tablespoons of butter total; half of it is used for the roux, half stirred in as enrichment. Modern sticks make this easy: 3 tablespoons is a little under half a stick.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted butter and unseasoned fish. Taste at the end — leftover boiled halibut is often already salted.
- YieldA pint of milk plus the fish gives about 2 1/2 cups, which is two generous first-course servings or three small ones. Serve hot with crackers or croutons.
This is a leftovers recipe dressed for the table. Halibut was widely eaten on the New England coast in the 1890s, sold in thick steaks, and a cook following the Boston Cooking School's economy might well have cold poached halibut on hand a day later. The recipe's style suggests it belongs with Farmer's "Soups Without Stock" chapter, which exists precisely for that household: milk-thickened soups that need no long-simmered bones and can be finished between courses. The blade of mace and the single slice of onion are the standard nineteenth-century seasoning for creamed fish and oysters — mace was often said to suit fish and dairy where nutmeg was too assertive — and the technique of sieving cooked flesh into a purée descends from the older English and French fish "potages" that long preceded the blender.