No. 1238

Salmon a la d'Artois—Fillets

Filets de Saumon a la d'Artois

Select a piece from the tail end of an uncooked fish, remove the meat from each flat side of the bone, suppress the skin and cut the fish into half inch thick slices, pare them the shape of a chicken fillet, season and cover both sides with a forcemeat (No. 90) wet with beaten egg-whites and sprinkle over with finely chopped truffles, lay them in a buttered sautoir, baste the fish with melted butter and cook in a moderate oven. When done dress the pieces in a circle and garnish the center with cooked minced truffles and mushrooms. Cover over with a bearnaise sauce (No. 433) made with lobster butter (No. 580) and finished with meat glaze (No. 402).

← No. 1237 Salmon a l'Argentine Salmon & Trout No. 1239 Salmon a la Daumont →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with a numbered reference system, so this reads as shorthand. The whole dish hinges on the forcemeat coating: it has to be stiff enough to stay put and thin enough that the salmon underneath is not overcooked while the mousseline sets.

The cross-referencesNo. 90 is the forcemeat; No. 433 is béarnaise; No. 580 is lobster butter, made by pounding shells and coral with butter and straining; No. 402 is meat glaze, a brown stock reduced to a syrup. Any modern equivalent of each will carry the dish — a food-processor salmon or pike mousseline, a standard béarnaise, and a well-reduced veal or chicken glace.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, not a deep casserole. Any heavy oven-safe skillet or a shallow metal baking dish works; the point is that the fillets sit in a single layer with the butter around them.
"A moderate oven"Roughly 325 to 350F. Half-inch slices under a forcemeat jacket need roughly 10 to 14 minutes; pull them when the coating is just set and springy and the salmon reads 125F at the center. Salmon cooked until it flakes freely is already dry.
Egg whites in the forcemeatThe whites are there to bind and to lighten, not to make a batter. Beat them only until loose and slightly frothy, then work in just enough to make the farce spreadable — too much and it slumps off the fish in the oven.
TrufflesFresh black truffle at the quantity implied here is a serious expense. Preserved truffle peelings give the look; a mince of well-browned cremini or dried porcini, wrung dry, gives more flavor for the money and reads correctly against the lobster butter.
"Pare them the shape of a chicken fillet"Trim each slice to a rounded teardrop, thicker at one end, so the pieces overlap neatly in the circle. The trimmings should go into the forcemeat rather than the bin.
The sauceBéarnaise mounted with lobster butter breaks more readily than one made with plain clarified butter, because the shell butter carries water and solids. Keep it near 130F, add the lobster butter last and off the heat, and stir the meat glaze in a teaspoon at a time until the color is a pale coral-brown.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A tail-end piece from a whole salmon, filleted and sliced, might give roughly eight fillets — perhaps four servings as a main course, six or eight in a longer menu of the kind this book assumes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertory set down in numbered order, which is why almost every recipe leans on another one by number. Garnishes labeled à la d'Artois belong to the nineteenth-century French practice of naming dishes after noble houses and titles — the comte d'Artois was the future Charles X — and by Ranhofer's day such names functioned as menu vocabulary more than as history, signaling a style of presentation rather than any documented connection to the person. The construction here is thoroughly of its period: a fine fish masked in its own forcemeat, studded with truffle, arranged in a ring around a mound of garnish and flooded with a compound sauce. The lobster butter folded into béarnaise is the sort of gilding that made Delmonico's reputation, and the meat glaze at the end — brown stock in a fish sauce — shows how freely the classical kitchen crossed the line between land and sea that later cooking treated as fixed.