No. 1241

Salmon, French Style

Saumon a la Francaise

Dress a small salmon, put it into a fish kettle and moisten with mirepoix stock and white wine (No. 419); set it on the hot fire and as soon as it reaches the boiling degree, skim and put it aside, keeping it at the same degree of heat, but without boiling for an hour or more, according to the size of the fish. When done suppress the skin and sanguineous parts covering the flesh, glaze it over with fish glaze (No. 399) and lobster butter (No. 580) mixed, dress on a dish and garnish around with mushroom heads, small truffles and milts cooked in a marinade. Cover over with financiere sauce (No. 464) and lay around the garnishing small slices of eel fried in butter, glazed crawfish and bread croutons fried in butter; serve a financiere sauce (No. 464) separately.

← No. 1240 Salmon a la Duperre—Darne Salmon & Trout No. 1242 Salmon a la Moderne →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes a full brigade and a numbered cross-reference system, so most of the work here is reconstructing what the numbers stood for. The one thing to fix outright is the poaching time.

The hour is the problemA whole small salmon held near boiling for an hour or more emerges dry and flaking apart; the kitchens Ranhofer wrote for served fish far more cooked than we like it. Poach at 160-170F and pull the fish when the thickest part reads 125-130F, roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness, which for a 4-5 lb salmon is 25-35 minutes.
Fish kettleA long oval pan with a perforated lift-out rack, so the fish can be raised without breaking. A deep roasting pan works if you sling the salmon in doubled cheesecloth and leave the ends long as handles.
Mirepoix stock and white wineNo. 419 is the book's mirepoix stock, a diced vegetable and raw ham preparation moistened with stock and wine; here it does the work of a court bouillon. Use enough liquid to just cover the fish.
"Suppress the skin and sanguineous parts"Peel the skin from the upper side while the fish is still warm and scrape away the dark brown lateral muscle beneath it. That layer is strongly flavoured and looks grey once cooked.
Fish glaze and lobster butterFish glaze (No. 399) is fish stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm; lobster butter (No. 580) is butter pounded with lobster shells and coral, then strained. Mixed and brushed on warm fish they give a coral-pink lacquer. A reduced fish fumet whisked into softened butter with a little tomato paste reads much the same on the plate.
MiltsSoft roe, the male fish's sperm sacs, usually herring or carp. Fishmongers rarely carry them now; poached quenelles or additional mushroom caps fill the same role in the garnish.
Financiere sauceHis No. 464 is a Madeira-based demi-glace finished with truffle essence and mushroom cooking liquor. Truffle is the defining note, so a mushroom-and-Madeira reduction with a few drops of truffle oil is the honest substitute if fresh truffles are out of reach.
YieldA whole salmon of 4-5 lb with this garnish would serve eight to ten as a formal course. The recipe has the fish covered with financiere sauce and a further boat of it sent to table separately.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and it is a good specimen of the way the book works: nearly every element is a cross-reference to a preparation given elsewhere, because the recipes were written for cooks who already had glazes, compound butters and mother sauces standing in the larder. The garnish is financiere, a nineteenth-century French set piece traditionally said to be named for the financier's appetite for expensive things -- truffles, cockscombs, mushrooms, crayfish -- and it is applied here to a fish rather than the sweetbreads or vol-au-vent where it more usually appeared. The extravagance in the dish lies largely in what is piled around the salmon: the truffles, the crayfish, the lobster butter and the fried eel, that last a reminder that eel was an ordinary market fish in American cities well into the twentieth century.