Boiled Halibut
Allow fifteen minutes to each pound in boiling; turn it over in the fish-cloth when half done. Serve any creamy sauce with it.
A single-line instruction from an era when fish was cooked far longer than we would now tolerate. The technique is sound; the timing is not.
- The timing is the problemFifteen minutes per pound will turn halibut into dry, chalky flakes, as it is a lean fish with little collagen or fat to protect it. Judge by thickness instead: roughly 10 minutes per inch at a bare simmer, or until the centre reaches 130-135F and the flesh just separates.
- Do not actually boil itDespite the title, a rolling boil breaks the flakes apart and squeezes out moisture. Bring the liquid to a boil, then drop it to 160-175F so the surface barely trembles, and hold it there.
- The fish-clothThe piece was wrapped in a square of cheesecloth or muslin, or laid on a cloth sling, so it could be lifted from the kettle intact. A perforated rack in a wide pan, or a double thickness of cheesecloth with the ends left long, does the same job.
- Turning itThe instruction to turn halfway most likely reflects a deep fish kettle in which the piece was not fully covered by the liquid. If your fish is fully submerged, leave it alone; halibut is fragile and every handling costs you flakes.
- The cooking liquidThe recipe never says what the fish is boiled in; period practice was salted water, sometimes with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice to firm the flesh and keep it white. A light court bouillon with onion, bay and peppercorns is a better use of the same effort.
- "Any creamy sauce"For a book of this period that ordinarily means a white sauce built on butter, flour and milk, extended into egg sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg, or made partly with the poaching liquid. Hollandaise and a lemon-caper butter both suit the fish.
- YieldReckon 6 to 8 oz of raw halibut per person. A 3 lb centre-cut piece serves six with sauce and a starch.
Boiled fish, served whole or in a thick centre cut under a blanket of white sauce, was the standard formal fish course in American and British households through the nineteenth century, and the fish kettle with its lifting rack was a fixture of any well-equipped kitchen. Halibut suited the method because it is firm enough to survive the liquid and cuts into thick, steak-like pieces that hold their shape. The Butterick Cook Book of 1911 came from the pattern-and-magazine publisher of the same name, aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns, and its terseness here is typical: one imagines a reader who already owned a fish kettle and knew what a creamy sauce meant. The generous cooking times found throughout period fish cookery are often attributed to a genuine caution about freshness in the days before reliable cold chains, and perhaps also to a taste, now largely gone, for fish cooked through to opaque firmness rather than left translucent at the centre.