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Baked Salmon with Cream Sauce
Take a middle cut of salmon; butter a large sheet of white paper and wrap the salmon in it, pinning the ends firmly together. Melt four ounces of butter by mixing with it three tablespoonfuls of boiling water. Lay the fish, wrapped in paper, in a bakingpan and pour over the butter and water. Cover and place it in a moderate oven for an hour, lifting up the cover now and then to see that the paper is not burning. Boil one-half pint of cream, thickened with one heaping tablespoonful of corn starch; add to this one ounce of butter, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and a small quantity each of pepper and salt. When the salmon is taken out of the paper and dished, pour half of the sauce over it and serve the balance in a sauceboat.
A whole center cut of salmon baked in a buttered paper wrapper, with a thickened cream sauce. The technique is sound; the timing belongs to an era of much larger fish and much lower expectations about doneness.
- The hour is the problemA modern 2 to 3 lb center cut, wrapped and baked at 350F, is done in 25 to 35 minutes, at an internal temperature of 125-130F at the thickest point. An hour will give you dry, flaking, chalky salmon. Use a thermometer through the paper rather than the clock.
- Moderate oven350F. The instruction to lift the cover and check the paper matters less at that temperature than it did in a coal range with uneven hot spots, but scorched paper is still a sign the pan is too close to the heat.
- The paperButtered parchment does exactly what the white paper did and will not scorch as readily. Kitchen twine is easier than pins. Foil works but steams the fish more aggressively, so check earlier.
- "A middle cut"The phrase presumably assumes a whole salmon being portioned, as in a hotel kitchen. Ask for a center cut of 2 to 3 lb, skin on, in one piece — the thick section behind the head and ahead of the tail, which cooks evenly.
- Butter and boiling waterMixing three tablespoons of boiling water into four ounces of melted butter makes a loose emulsion that will not break and scorch as fast as plain butter. Four ounces is half a cup, and it is generous; two ounces is enough for a smaller cut.
- The sauce is very thickA heaping tablespoon of cornstarch to half a pint (one cup) of cream sets up nearly to a paste once it cools. Two teaspoons gives a sauce that still pours. Bring the cream to a bare boil, add the slurry, cook a minute to lose the raw starch flavor, then finish off the heat with the butter and parsley.
- YieldA 2 to 3 lb cut serves four to six as a main course. The sauce recipe is about right for that; half over the fish, half in a boat, as written.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working reference for a hotel kitchen that served both à la carte guests and enormous private banquets. Baking a fish in buttered paper is the plainer cousin of en papillote, a French restaurant technique in which the paper traps steam and aromatics; here the parcel simply protects a large cut from the dry, fierce heat of a range oven while the butter-and-water bath keeps the pan from burning. The cream sauce thickened with cornstarch rather than a flour roux is a mark of the period — cornstarch had become a cheap, reliable American pantry staple by the 1890s, and it is easy to see the appeal, in a hotel kitchen, of a sauce that held its body on a steam table over one with a subtler finish. Salmon itself was still a seasonal luxury shipped east on ice, which may be part of why it gets a whole middle cut and a sauceboat of its own.