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Baked Halibut or Salmon
Let the fish remain in cold water, slightly salted, for an hour before it is time to cook it; place the gridiron on a dripping pan with a little hot water in it and bake in a hot oven; just before it is done, butter it well on the top, and brown it nicely. The time of baking depends upon the size of the fish. A small fish will bake in about half an hour, and a large one in an hour.
They are very nice when cooked as above and served with a sauce which is made from the gravy in the dripping pan, to which is added a tablespoon of catsup and another of some pungent sauce and the juice of a lemon. Thicken with brown flour moistened with a little cold water. Garnish handsomely with sprigs of parsley and currant jelly.
A straightforward baked fish with a pan sauce, written for cooks who judged doneness by eye. The main adjustments are oven temperature, timing, and the setup with the gridiron.
- The hinge: the fish sits above the water, not in itThe gridiron rests inside the dripping pan so the fish is held clear of the hot water beneath. That water is there to make steam and to catch drippings for the sauce, not to poach the fish. A wire rack set in a roasting pan does the same job.
- "A hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F; 425F is a fair working figure. At that heat a thick halibut steak or a salmon fillet is done well before the times given here.
- Timing, revisedThe half-hour to one hour reflects whole fish, often several pounds, cooked in an unreliable range. Modern practice is roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at 425F, pulling the fish at 125-130F at the thickest point for salmon, 135F for halibut. Halibut is lean and turns dry and cottony fast.
- The hour in salted waterThis is a light brine, and it still works: it seasons the flesh and firms it. A tablespoon of salt per quart of cold water for an hour is plenty, and the fish should be patted dry before it goes on the rack.
- "Some pungent sauce"In an 1870s American kitchen this means a bottled table sauce, most often Worcestershire or a Harvey's-style sauce. A teaspoon or two of Worcestershire is the closest equivalent; the "catsup" of the period was usually tomato, though mushroom and walnut catsups were still in use.
- Brown flourFlour dry-toasted in a pan until tan and nutty, used to thicken and colour a sauce without a butter roux. It thickens less than raw flour, so allow a tablespoon or more per cup of pan liquid, slaked in cold water first.
- Pan gravy may be thinWith a rack-and-water setup you get diluted drippings rather than concentrated fond. Reduce what collects in the pan before thickening it, or the sauce will taste watery.
- YieldFigure 6-8 oz of fish per person. The currant jelly is served in small spoonfuls alongside, in the older manner of sweet-tart accompaniments to fish and game, and can be left off.
Baked halibut and baked salmon sit side by side in nineteenth-century American cookbooks because both were, for their regions, abundant and cheap: halibut came off the North Atlantic banks into Boston in enormous quantities, and salmon ran in rivers from the Penobscot to the Columbia before dams and overfishing thinned them. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in 1874 from contributions by local women and sold to benefit a charitable home, is often said to be one of the earliest American charity cookbooks, and its fish chapter reflects what the railroads and the ice trade could deliver inland. The pan sauce, built on bottled catsup and a "pungent sauce" and finished with lemon, is very much of its moment: Worcestershire and its imitators had become fixtures on the American table by the 1860s, and cooks reached for them the way a later generation reached for stock cubes. The currant jelly garnish is older still, a survival of the long English habit of pairing sharp sweet preserves with roasted flesh.