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Salmon Cutlets with Milanese Sauce
Cut a piece of salmon into slices, and cut each slice into halves; trim away the skin and bone. Dip each piece in a small quantity of white wine, wrap them in sheets of buttered writing paper, and fasten them securely at the edges. Put a lump of butter in a fryingpan, and when boiling fry the salmon in it. When cooked, remove the papers from the salmon, place it in a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper on a hot dish, garnish with fried parsley, and serve with a sauceboatful of Milanese sauce.
A brief, professional-shorthand recipe of the sort Oscar wrote for cooks who already knew the house repertoire. Two things need translating: the paper and the sauce.
- Writing paper means parchmentWriting paper means plain paper, not modern coated stock -- Nineteenth-century writing paper was plain, unglazed stock, and plain paper was commonly used for cooking en papillote. Modern papers may carry bleaches, sizing and inks and are best kept away from food and hot butter; use baking parchment cut to the same shape and folded and crimped at the edges.
- This is pan cookery, not oven cookeryThe parcels go into foaming butter in a frying pan over moderate heat, not into an oven. The paper insulates the fish, so it steams in its own moisture and wine rather than searing; expect roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side for pieces about an inch thick.
- "Cutlets" is a shape, not a cutSlice the salmon crosswise into steaks, then halve each steak along the backbone line and remove skin and bones, leaving two curved pieces per slice that resemble small chops. Even thickness matters more than exact size.
- DonenessModern cooks often take salmon to about 125-130F at the centre for a moist result, though this is below the 145F generally recommended for fish. Victorian fish cookery tended towards cooking through until firm, so a few minutes less than the old standard is the change worth considering.
- Milanese sauceIn kitchens of this period a sauce milanaise was generally a tomato-flavoured brown sauce, sometimes finished with grated Parmesan, and the milanaise garnish proper involved macaroni, ham, tongue and mushroom. Oscar assumed the reader would take it from the sauce chapter; any well-made tomato-enriched demi-glace fits.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs completely before they meet hot fat, and give them only 15 to 20 seconds at around 350F. Wet parsley spits violently and turns black rather than bright green.
- ServingThe folded napkin under the fish absorbs butter and holds heat, and the sauce goes to table separately in its sauceboat so the paper-cooked surface stays dry. Two halves make a portion; the recipe specifies no quantity of fish.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf, but as maître d'hôtel he was the public face of its dining rooms, and the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf collected some nine hundred pages of the hotel's largely French repertoire for American households. Cooking fish in buttered paper was standard practice in that repertoire: the parcel holds in moisture and the aroma of the wine. The Italian name attached to the sauce is often said to reflect a late-nineteenth-century French habit of labelling tomato-and-Parmesan preparations à la milanaise, though the etymology is contested.