No. 810

Salmon with Sauterne Wine

Saumon au vin de Sauterne

Mince some onions, put them in a flat saucepan, with butter, add a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme, bay leaves, and a few cloves of garlic, fry the whole slightly in butter, add whole pepper, grated nutmeg, ground pepper, salt, moisten it with Sauterne wine, boil and let simmer during one hour; pass through a fine sieve, put this stock in a saucepan, add the salmon, cover the saucepan tightly, put in the oven for about thirty minutes, arrange them on a deep dish, pour the stock over so as the fish will be entirely covered and let it cool off.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cold salmon braise: the fish cooks in a strained aromatic wine stock and is then left to set in it. Everything depends on gentle heat and on not reducing the liquid away, since it is both cooking medium and glaze.

The hinge: cook it barelyThirty minutes in an oven is far too long for salmon by modern standards. Bring the strained stock to a bare simmer, add the fish, cover, and hold it in a 300F oven only until the thickest part reads 120-125F on a thermometer — roughly 12-15 minutes for inch-thick steaks or a small centre-cut piece. It will carry over as it cools in the liquid.
Oven heatRanhofer gives none. Use 300F, or set the covered pan over the lowest burner. If the stock boils, the albumin squeezes out in white curds and the flesh goes dry and chalky.
Which SauterneIn 1890s American usage "Sauterne" without the final s was often a generic label for white wine, including California bottlings, but the spelling was also used for the sweet Bordeaux, and a French chef at Delmonico's may well have meant the real thing. Either a dry white with some body — Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc, an unoaked white Bordeaux — or a genuine Sauternes will do. About a bottle, enough to cover the fish later.
"A bunch of parsley garnished with thyme, bay leaves"A bouquet garni: parsley stems tied around two or three thyme sprigs and a couple of bay leaves. Two or three garlic cloves, lightly crushed, are plenty.
Whole pepper and ground pepper bothThe recipe adds them together, before the hour's simmer, so the whole peppercorns are strained out while the ground pepper stays in the liquid. Whether the doubling was deliberate is not stated. A teaspoon of peppercorns and a few grinds is about right.
Fry "slightly"The onions should sweat soft and translucent without colouring. Browning them gives the finished stock a muddy tint, which shows badly in a clear cold dish.
Getting it to setStraining removes the vegetables but leaves a thin liquid. Ranhofer asks only that the stock cover the fish and be left to cool; if you want the light jelly such cold dishes often carried, simmer salmon skin, bones and trimmings in the wine stock, or add a scant teaspoon of powdered gelatine per cup.
Cooling and holdingLet it cool at room temperature no longer than an hour, then refrigerate covered. Serve within two days, straight from the cold, with lemon and a green mayonnaise or a mustard sauce.
YieldRanhofer gives no quantities. Two pounds of salmon and a bottle of wine will serve six to eight; the dish sits here among the cold side dishes.

A Little History

This is No. 810 of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits among the cold side dishes — the sandwiches, aspics and moulded salads that furnished a buffet or a supper table where guests served themselves. Cooking a fish in seasoned wine and then letting it cool and set in its cooking liquor is a very old French method, a relative of court-bouillon poaching and of the fully jellied saumon en gelée; the cold dish was prized in the nineteenth century precisely because it could be finished hours ahead and carried whole to the table. The spelling "Sauterne" without the final s is a period American convention: by the 1880s the word had drifted into a generic label for white wine, and California producers used it freely.