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Baked Halibut Steak
2 pounds halibut steak
1 cup milk
Butter or other fat
Pepper and salt
Rub steaks well with butter or other fat, pepper and salt. Lay steaks in baking-pan and pour the milk over them. Baste often while cooking, until all the milk is used. Serve with mushroom sauce.
HALIBUT CREOLE (BAKED)
2 pounds halibut
= tablespoons butter or other
2 cups stewed tomatoes fat
1 cup water
1 tablespoon flour
3 cloves
Salt and pepper
1 slice onion
Put the tomatoes, water, cloves and onion on the stove in a stew-pan to boil. Mix the butter or other fat and flour together, stir them into the sauce when it boils and add the salt and pepper. Cook ten minutes and strain into a bowl.
Pour boiling water into a deep plate to the depth of one-half inch, and lay the fish in it for one minute, skin side down; when the fish is removed from the water, the black skin can be taken off easily. Wash the fish in cold water, season with salt and pepper and lay it on the baking sheet in a dripping-pan, put sliced lemon on top, then pour half the tomato sauce around the fish and bake for thirty to forty-five minutes, basting three times with the remainder of the tomato sauce. Pour the sauce remaining in the bottom of the pan around the fish on the serving platter.
Two straightforward baked halibut treatments, both written for a cook who was expected to know her own oven and judge fish by eye. The chief thing to correct is the cooking time.
- Oven temperatureNeither recipe gives one, and the book supplies no oven term to translate. Around 400F suits a steak an inch thick.
- Time is the real problemTime -- Thirty to forty-five minutes will dry out a thin steak, though a thick two-pound piece will take longer than a cut steak. Halibut is very lean and firm; figure roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness and check early, at the point where the flesh has just lost its glassiness.
- Basting with milkThe milk in the first recipe is a basting liquid, not a sauce. It will scorch and skin over in a hot oven, so baste often as directed and add a splash of water to the pan if it reduces to nothing.
- "Butter or other fat"The phrase recurs through the book, a standard allowance for substituting cheaper fats for butter. Butter is the right choice here.
- Loosening the skinThe one-minute dip in half an inch of boiling water in the Creole version genuinely works, and is worth knowing: the brief heat lets the black skin be pulled away easily. Wash the fish in cold water afterwards, as directed.
- The tomato sauceTwo cups stewed tomatoes plus a cup of water is thin by design, since it is meant to reduce in the pan. The butter-and-flour paste stirred into boiling liquid is a beurre manié; add it in small pinches or it will lump.
- ClovesThree whole cloves in two cups of sauce is assertive by current taste. They are strained out, but if you dislike clove with fish, use one.
- YieldTwo pounds of halibut serves four generously, five if there are substantial sides. The mushroom sauce for the first recipe is not given here; period versions are usually a white or brown sauce with cooked mushrooms added.
Halibut appears in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century as a fish that came to market in thick, meaty steaks that behaved more like veal cutlets than like the delicate flatfish home cooks feared overcooking. Halibut is now a comparatively expensive fish and stocks are managed with quotas. The "Creole" label here means only tomato, onion and a hint of clove -- shorthand for anything sauced with stewed tomatoes rather than anything specifically from Louisiana. The repeated "butter or other fat" reflects a period habit of allowing substitution for butter, and points to a wartime-conservation era text.