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Salmon Cutlets with Caper Sauce
Put some slices of salmon in oil with a little chopped parsley and chives and let them steep for one or two hours. Dip some pieces of paper in the oil that the salmon has marinaded in and wrap a piece around each slice. Place them on a well-greased gridiron and broil over a clear slow fire for from forty-five to fifty minutes, according to the thickness of the slices, turning them occasionally. Remove the paper from the cutlets, place them on a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper on a hot dish and serve with a sauceboatful of white caper sauce.
This is grilling en papillote — the oiled paper both bastes the fish and shields it from the fire. The one thing not to carry over is the timing.
- Forty-five minutes is wrong for salmonA steak of any thickness a home cook will buy is done in 8 to 12 minutes total over medium heat, pulled at 125-130F at the thickest point. The original assumes a slow bed of coals and much thicker cuts off a whole fish; at modern grill temperatures the same schedule would give you dry, chalky flakes.
- "Cutlets"Crosswise steaks cut through the bone rather than fillets; the recipe says only "slices" and leaves the thickness open, since it tells you to time by it. A center-cut steak with the belly flaps tucked around into a round holds together best on a grate.
- "A clear slow fire"Charcoal burned down until the flames are gone and the coals are covered in grey ash — roughly medium heat, and no flare-ups, since the oiled paper will catch if a flame licks it. On a gas grill, medium with the lid down.
- The paperUse parchment rather than waxed paper. Cut squares large enough to overlap underneath, brush both sides with the marinade oil, and fold rather than tie.
- GridironA hinged double-sided grill basket does the job the old wire gridiron did, and it lets you turn all the parcels at once without the paper tearing.
- The marinadeOne to two hours in oil with parsley and chives is right; there is no acid here, so it will not firm or cure the fish. Salt the salmon just before wrapping.
- White caper sauceIn this period that generally means a white sauce base — butter and flour, fish stock or milk — finished with capers, lemon and sometimes a little of the caper brine. Not a brown butter, and not mayonnaise-based.
- YieldFigure one steak of 6 to 8 oz per person, and about a half cup of sauce for four.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook by trade — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 book under his name reflects what the hotel's French-trained kitchen was sending out, and this dish is a fair sample of it: a plain fish, a paper wrapper, a mother sauce, and a folded napkin under the plate. Cooking in oiled or buttered paper is a long-standing French technique, and it was done over coals as well as in an oven. Capers with salmon was common in nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining, the sharp brine cutting a rich fish, and boiled salmon with caper or lobster sauce appears in English cookbooks well before the Waldorf existed. The napkin and the ornamental dish-paper put presentation instructions inside the recipe itself, though such directions are also routine in English domestic cookery books of the period.