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Hollenden Halibut
Arrange six thin slices fat salt pork two and one-half inches square in a dripping-pan. Cover with one small onion, thinly sliced, and add a bit of bay leaf. Wipe a twopound piece of chicken halibut and place over pork and onion. Mask with three tablespoons butter creamed and mixed with three tablespoons flour. Cover with three-fourths cup buttered cracker crumbs and arrange thin strips of fat salt pork over crumbs. Cover with buttered paper and bake fifty minutes in a moderate oven, removing paper during the last fifteen minutes of the cooking to brown crumbs. Remove to hot serving dish and garnish with slices of lemon cut in fancy shapes sprinkled with finely chopped parsley and paprika. Serve with White Sauce II, using fat in pan in place of butter.
A hotel dish built on a lean fish, salt pork for fat, and a crumb crust. The only real problem is the baking time, which belongs to an era before anyone measured fish by internal temperature.
- The hinge: fifty minutes is far too longA 2-lb piece of halibut is done at 130-135F at the center, which takes roughly 20-30 minutes at 350F depending on thickness. Halibut is very lean and turns dry and fibrous past that; check with a thermometer at 20 minutes and finish the crumbs under the broiler if they need color.
- Moderate oven350F. The buttered paper is there to keep the crumb crust from browning before the fish is cooked, which matters much less over a shorter bake.
- Chicken halibutNot chicken at all — a market term for a small young halibut, the smallest trade grade, prized for finer flesh than the huge fish. Any thick center-cut halibut steak or fillet piece serves; Pacific halibut is the widely available option now, since Atlantic halibut stocks are depleted and best avoided.
- Fat salt porkCured pork belly fat, sold at some butchers; blanch it a minute in boiling water if it is very salty. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or fresh pork fatback are the usual stand-ins, and both bring more salt or less, so hold back on seasoning the sauce.
- Masking with creamed butter and flourButter and flour worked together cold is beurre manie. Spread it over the fish as a paste; it melts into the crumbs and the fish juices and thickens the pan drippings.
- Buttered paper and dripping-panParchment, buttered on the underside, laid loosely over the top — not a sealed foil tent. A dripping-pan is a shallow roasting pan; anything low-sided that fits the fish without crowding works.
- White Sauce IIFarmer's medium-thickness white sauce (roughly equal small measures of fat and flour to a cup of milk, salt and pepper); check the sauce chapter of your edition for the exact proportions. Here the pork and butter fat from the pan replaces the butter, so strain it and taste for salt before seasoning.
- YieldTwo pounds of fish plus sauce serves four generously as a main course.
The name follows a common convention in American hotel and restaurant cooking around 1900, when dishes were christened for the house that served them — the Hollenden was a large and fashionable Cleveland hotel of the era, and the attribution is traditional rather than documented in the book itself. The method is characteristic of nineteenth-century New England fish cookery: halibut, being lean, was often laid on salt pork and dressed with butter, crumbs and a milk-based sauce to supply the fat it lacks, much as cod and haddock were. The elaborate garnish — lemon cut in fancy shapes, chopped parsley, paprika — belongs to the same hotel-dining-room world, where paprika is generally said to have been a relatively recent arrival in the American pantry and used mostly for its color.