Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Salmon Cutlets with Oyster Sauce
Salmon Cutlets with Oyster Sauce
Cut three large slices from the middle of a salmon, and boil them in salted water. Put one teaspoonful of chopped onions in a saucepan with a small quantity of oil and toss them over the fire for a few minutes, but do not color. Cut four dozen oysters into small pieces, put them in with the onions, and stir them over the fire until well warmed through; then mix in two tablespoonfuls of flour, one-half tea-cupful of oyster liquor, two teaspoonfuls of sugar, a little essence of anchovies, and one pinch of salt and cayenne pepper; stir the above ingredients over the fire, let them boil for a few minutes, stir in quickly the beaten yolks of four eggs, and keep it on the fire for a minute or two longer. Pour the sauce on a dish and leave it until cold. Put the slices of salmon on the sauce, brush them over with beaten egg, and sprinkle breadcrumbs over them; brown them in a hot oven, garnish round with oysters, pour some lobster sauce over the fish and serve. Fillets of Salmon, Parisian Style Cut some slices of salmon into small fillets, place them in a buttered sautepan; sprinkle a small quantity of pepper and salt over, baste them with clarified butter, and cover with a round of buttered paper; saute them over a clear fire. Fix a croustade on a hot dish, fill it with oysters and picked shrimps that have been mixed in Hollandaise sauce, with the addition of some chopped parsley; arrange the fillets around the croustade, garnish with parsley, pour some of the sauce over and serve.
Fillets of Salmon with Ravigote Sauce Cut some fillets of salmon into small, equal-sized pieces, put them into a saucepan with the juice of half a lemon, a small quantity of chopped parsley, clarified butter, pepper and salt. Fry them over a slow fire, turning them when done on one side and cook the other. Drain the fillets, arrange them in a circle on a hot dish, pour some ravigote sauce in the center, and serve without delay.
Three related salmon dishes in the French service style of the 1890s Waldorf kitchen, written for cooks who already knew the mother sauces. The first is the odd one: a thick oyster custard sauce is cooked, chilled until it sets, and used as a bed under breaded salmon that then goes into the oven.
- The hinge: the sauce must go coldThe yolk-thickened oyster sauce is poured out and left until cold, as the recipe directs, so that it holds enough body to sit under the fish rather than spreading into a pool. If it goes on warm, expect the fish to sink into it.
- Do not boil after the yolks go inFour yolks stirred into a hot sauce can curdle if it returns to a boil, though the flour in this one offers some protection. Keep it below a simmer for the minute or two called for, stirring constantly, then pour it out.
- "Boil them in salted water"In books of this period "boil" often covered gentle simmering rather than a rolling boil. Salmon steaks held at a bare shiver, around 160-170F, for 8-10 minutes will be moist; a hard boil breaks the flakes apart and squeezes out albumin.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" here means 425-450F. The fish is already cooked, so this is purely to set the egg wash and colour the crumbs — five to eight minutes, or use a broiler and watch it.
- Four dozen oystersDepending on size, roughly two to three pints of shucked oysters. This is a late-nineteenth-century New York quantity, when oysters were the cheap ingredient in the dish; a pint will make a perfectly good sauce at modern prices.
- Tea-cupfulPeriod equivalences vary; a tea-cup is usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so half a tea-cupful of oyster liquor is roughly 2-3 fl oz. Strain the liquor through muslin to catch shell grit.
- Essence of anchoviesA bottled anchovy extract, thinner and saltier than modern paste. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste mashed smooth is the nearest thing; add it before the final salt, since it carries plenty of its own.
- Two teaspoonfuls of sugarNot a mistake; sugar turns up in some period shellfish sauces. Start with one and taste, or the sauce reads as sweet against the lobster sauce poured over at the end.
- Croustade and buttered paperA croustade is a hollowed, fried or baked bread or pastry case used as an edible container; a large vol-au-vent shell substitutes. The "round of buttered paper" is a cartouche — parchment cut to the pan, laid directly on the fish to keep it from drying.
- Ravigote and HollandaiseNamed rather than explained here. Ravigote came in both a cold vinaigrette form and a warm one, a velouté or butter sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallot and green herbs -- chervil, chives, tarragon, parsley; the hot dish and the instruction to serve without delay suggest the warm version.
- YieldThree centre-cut steaks serve three generously, or six as one course in a longer menu.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, having joined the hotel at its opening in 1893; the cook book that carries his name appeared in 1896 and reads less like a household manual than a working record of what a large French-trained hotel kitchen turned out. That accounts for the compression here — three dishes run together, with Hollandaise, lobster sauce and ravigote named rather than explained at this point, because any cook reading it was expected to have them to hand. The lavishness with oysters is the clearest period marker: New York harbour and the Long Island beds still supplied the city in enormous volume in the 1890s, and four dozen oysters chopped into a sauce for three slices of fish would not have seemed extravagant. Salmon at the same date was a seasonal luxury, brought to New York markets from the Maine rivers and, by rail and ice, from the Pacific coast.