Home › Baked Fish › Sandwiches of Chicken Halibut
Sandwiches of Chicken Halibut
Cut chicken halibut in thin fillets. Put together in pairs, with Fish or Chicken Force-meat between, first dipping fillets in melted butter seasoned with salt and pepper and brushing over with lemon juice. Place in shallow pan with one-fourth cup white wine. Bake twenty minutes in hot oven. Arrange on hot platter for serving, sprinkle with finely chopped parsley, garnish with Tomato Jelly, and serve with Hollandaise Sauce.
A composed fish dish from Fannie Farmer's baked-fish chapter: two thin fillets sandwiching a forcemeat, baked in wine and dressed up with aspic and hollandaise. Most of the work is in the components the recipe assumes you already have.
- "Chicken halibut" is halibutA market term for a small young halibut, usually said to be under about 20 lb, reputedly finer in flake and paler in flesh. There is no poultry in the dish. Any thick white fish that cuts into clean thin fillets will stand in.
- Hot ovenFarmer gives no numerical temperatures. A hot oven is conventionally read as roughly 425F.
- Cut the timeTwenty minutes at 425F will overcook thin fillets, even doubled with stuffing between. Start checking at 10 to 12 minutes; the sandwich is done when the forcemeat is set and the fish flakes at 135 to 140F at the centre.
- ForcemeatFarmer's fish and chicken forcemeats are a soft pounded paste of raw fish or chicken worked with butter, egg and cream, seasoned and used as a binding. About a tablespoon spread thin between fillets is enough; a thick layer will not cook through before the fish dries out.
- The wine is not a poaching liquidA quarter cup in a shallow pan is there to steam the underside and keep it from sticking. Do not add more or the fillets will simmer rather than bake, and the sandwich will slide apart when lifted.
- Keeping the pairs togetherThin fillets curl. Press the pairs firmly, chill them 15 minutes before baking, and lift them with two spatulas. A brush of the seasoned melted butter over the top keeps the exposed edges from drying.
- Tomato jellyA savoury tomato aspic set with gelatine, cut in cubes or diamonds and used cold as a garnish against the hot fish. It has to be made hours ahead.
- YieldThe original gives none. Figure two fillets of about 3 oz each per person, so one sandwich per serving; a 2 lb side of halibut makes five or six.
"Chicken halibut" belongs to a family of nineteenth-century market terms that borrowed poultry names for small or tender specimens, alongside "chicken lobster"; Atlantic halibut was still landed in great quantity off New England when this book was written in the 1890s. The recipe itself is a piece of restrained Franco-American cookery: forcemeat sealed between two thin slices, finished with hollandaise and a cold aspic garnish for colour contrast. Farmer's book routinely runs such dishes a few pages from boiled cod and salt fish hash, which is much of its interest now, since it shows a single household expected to move between plain provision and company-course fish work using the same range and the same set of sauces.