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Broiled Tranches of Salmon, Tartare
Procure three three-quarter-pound fresh salmon, scale, wash and thoroughly wipe them. Place on a dish with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, the juice of a lemon, a tablespoon oil and leaves from a branch parsley. Repeatedly turn salmon in seasoning, then let infuse for thirty minutes, being careful to turn pieces in seasoning quite frequently, arrange on a broiler, and broil for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, decorate with a little parsley, six quarters lemon, and serve with tartare sauce separately.
A straightforward marinated grill, though the wording obscures what you are actually buying and the timing belongs to a coal broiler rather than a modern one.
- What a "tranche" isTranche is French for a thick slice — here cross-cut salmon steaks, bone in. "Three three-quarter-pound salmon" most likely means three pieces of roughly 12 oz each rather than three whole fish, though the wording is ambiguous; either way it comes to about 2¼ lb of salmon in all, serving three to six depending on the rest of the meal.
- ScalingSteaks cut from a scaled side need no attention. If you are cutting from a whole fish, scale it before portioning, working from tail to head under running water, and rinse the cavity.
- The marinadeSalt, pepper, lemon juice, oil and parsley for thirty minutes is the whole seasoning. Lemon juice firms the surface protein, so do not extend the time much past half an hour or the outer flesh turns opaque and chalky before it meets heat.
- Broiler means grillIn 1906 "broil" meant direct radiant heat over or under coals. Under a modern overhead broiler, set the rack 4 inches from the element and preheat fully; on a gas or charcoal grill, work over direct high heat with well-oiled bars.
- Six minutes a side is too longTwelve minutes total will take inch-thick salmon well past dry. Allow about 4 minutes on the first side and 2 to 3 on the second, pulling the fish at 120–125°F at the thickest point for translucent centres, or 130°F if you prefer it fully set.
- Turning onceOil the grate rather than the fish alone, and move the steaks only once. Salmon skin and belly fat stick hard, and repeated flipping is what breaks steaks apart.
- Tartare saucePeriod versions are mayonnaise-based, with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot and parsley; some are built on raw yolk, others on sieved hard-boiled yolk. If you make it from scratch with raw egg, use pasteurised eggs; otherwise a good commercial mayonnaise sharpened with lemon and the same chopped pickles is closer to the intent than bottled tartare.
- Presentation"Dress one overlapping another" means the steaks are shingled down a hot platter, not arranged in a ring. Six lemon quarters and parsley are the whole garnish, and the sauce goes to table in a separate boat.
This is service-book French written in English: tranche, the infuse for a marinade, the sauce served separately — all professional kitchen vocabulary. Salmon steaks with tartare sauce was a fixture of grill menus on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. Tartare sauce is generally traced to the French sauce tartare of the mid-1800s, a cold mayonnaise-based sauce whose name is usually attributed to the Tartars, though the connection is traditional rather than documented; it attached itself to grilled and fried fish early and has stayed there. A book called The International Cook Book presenting such a dish tells you how thoroughly French technique was treated as the international default in American hotel cookery of the period.