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Baked Halibut
Take three or four pounds of the fish and remove the dark skin by dipping the part covered by it into boiling water and scraping. Rub the flesh over with salt and pepper, place it in a bakingpan and pour over milk to the depth of about one inch in the pan. Put the pan in the oven and bake for an hour or more, basting frequently with the milk. Take out the fish, remove the bone and skin, put it on a dish in its original shape and serve with egg sauce, cream sauce or plain drawn butter. The dish may be garnished with slices of hard-boiled eggs, or it may be served with bread-crumbs sprinkled over and tomato sauce in a tureen.
A plain baked fish from the Waldorf's kitchen, written when halibut came in enormous slabs and fish was cooked far longer than we would now. The sauces do most of the work.
- The hour is the problemA 3-4 lb halibut cut needs roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at 375F, or about 25-35 minutes for a thick center piece. An hour of baking will leave halibut dry and chalky; it is a lean fish with very little fat to protect it. Pull it at 130-135F at the thickest point and let it rest.
- Oven temperatureOscar gives none. Use 375F, or 350F if you want a gentler result with the milk. Baste frequently, as directed.
- The milk bathAn inch of milk in the pan is both a poaching medium and a basting liquid, and it keeps the surface from drying. It will scald and may form a skin; that is expected. Strain the pan liquid and use it as the base for the cream sauce rather than throwing it out.
- Skinning by dippingDipping the dark-skin side into boiling water loosens it so it scrapes off with the back of a knife. If you buy halibut skinless, skip this entirely. The instruction presumes fish bought with the skin still on.
- Drawn butter and egg sauceDrawn butter here is not simply melted butter but a light butter-and-flour sauce thinned with water or fish liquor. Egg sauce is that same sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred through, which is why the garnish of egg slices repeats the theme.
- "Original shape"Boning the cooked fish and reassembling it on the platter was standard service presentation. Halibut flakes into large clean sections, so this works, but handle it with two spatulas and do it on the serving dish, not in the pan.
- Which halibutAtlantic halibut stocks collapsed in the twentieth century and the fish is best avoided. Pacific halibut is the usual substitute; a thick cut of cod, hake or turbot behaves much the same in this treatment.
- YieldThree to four pounds of halibut as bought, bone in, serves about six as a main course, with sauce and a starch.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) came out of a hotel that served halibut constantly, and it arrived in slabs large enough to carve like a roast. Baking a piece in milk was a common nineteenth-century American method for lean white fish, and the reasoning was practical rather than fancy: milk kept the flesh moist, tempered any hint of strong flavor, and left behind a liquid that became the sauce. The battery of finishes Oscar lists at the end - egg sauce, cream sauce, drawn butter, crumbs and tomato - reads as a hotel cook's habit of thinking, one preparation with several faces so the same fish could appear on the menu a different way each night.