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Salmon en Matelote
Wash and truss a small salmon in the shape of the letter S, and boil it in salted water. When cooked, drain it, put it on a hot dish, bend some legs of lobster at the joints, and stick the ends in the back of the salmon from head to tail. Have prepared the following sauce: Put six tablespoonfuls of butter in one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of butter sauce, stir it over the fire until it is hot, then stir in quickly two eggs that have been beaten with a small quantity of lemon juice, and pepper and salt to taste. Pour the sauce over the fish, garnish it with small strips of fillets of sole that have been dipped in beaten egg and breadcrumbs and fried, and serve. Salmon, Maitre d'Hotel Squeeze a small quantity of lemon juice over some slices of salmon, and leave them for a short time. When ready cover each slice with chopped fennel and parsley, put the fish in a saucepan, cover it with broth that has been thickened with flour and water, and let it simmer gently until cooked. Place the salmon on a hot dish, and serve it with maitre d'hotel sauce.
Two recipes have run together in the original text: the elaborate en matelote presentation and, after it, a plain poached salmon with maître d'hôtel sauce. Both assume a professional kitchen with a stockpot and a finished butter sauce already on hand.
- The hinge: eggs off the heatThe two beaten eggs stirred into hot butter sauce are what thicken and enrich it, and they will scramble if the pan stays on the flame. Pull the pan off, beat the eggs with the lemon juice first as directed, and stream them in while whisking; the residual heat is enough.
- "Butter sauce"Not simply a pan of melted butter. In period cookery the term generally meant a light flour-thickened sauce (fish stock or milk with a white roux) finished with butter — close to what a modern cook would build as a velouté. The extra six tablespoons of butter and the eggs turn it into something richer, nearer a loose hollandaise.
- Breakfast cupfulTake it as roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, though the measure was never standardised; one and a half of them works out somewhere between 1½ and 2 cups of sauce.
- Boiling the salmonThe text calls for boiling in salted water, and that treatment ruins the fish by modern standards. Salmon is generally taken off at 125–130°F at the thickest point; hold the water at a bare shiver, and a court bouillon (water, wine, onion, bay, peppercorns) gives far more flavour than salt alone.
- Trussing in an SThe fish is bent and tied with kitchen string before poaching so it holds a curve on the platter. A whole 4–6 lb salmon is the practical size for a domestic pan; a fish kettle or a large roasting pan on two burners will take it.
- The lobster legsPurely decorative — cooked lobster legs bent at the joint and pushed into the fish's back to suggest fins. Skip them without loss, or use the legs from a lobster you are serving anyway.
- Fried sole garnishCut the fillets into finger-width strips (goujons), egg-and-crumb them, and fry at 350–375°F for about two minutes until just golden. Fry them last and drain them, or they soften against the sauced fish.
- Maître d'hôtelFor the second recipe, this is simply softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced onto the hot fish. Fennel here means the herb fronds, not the bulb.
Matelote means "sailor-style," and in French cooking it properly describes a freshwater fish stew — classically eel or carp — braised in red or white wine with onions and mushrooms. What Oscar Tschirky puts under the name is something else entirely: a whole poached salmon dressed for a dining room, trussed into a letter S and studded with lobster legs to mimic fins. That gap between the peasant original and the hotel version is the whole story of grand-hotel cooking at the turn of the century, when a rustic name lent prestige to a dish built for display on a silver platter. Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled the book in 1896 from the hotel's working repertoire, which is why the instructions assume a cook who already has butter sauce standing on the stove and a fish kettle large enough for a whole salmon.