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Chicken Halibut, Caper Sauce
Procure three slices fresh chicken halibut of three-quarters of a pound each. Place in a frying pan with half ounce butter, half gill white wine, one gill water, two branches parsley, juice of a quarter lemon, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover fish with lightly buttered paper, then cook on range five minutes and set in oven for twenty-five minutes and remove, lift up paper, take up fish with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish and remove spinal bone.
Prepare a caper sauce, add two tablespoons of the fish liquor to the caper sauce, mix well, pour over fish and serve.
A straightforward braise in the oven, written for cooks who knew what "chicken halibut" and "caper sauce" meant without being told. Two things need translating: the fish itself, and the cooking time.
- What chicken halibut isNot chicken at all — a small young halibut. The trade term is applied to smaller fish, though the cut-off cited varies from a few pounds up to around 20 lb, and the small fish are reputed to have a finer flake and paler flesh than the huge mature ones. Ask for center-cut halibut steaks about an inch thick; three quarter-pound steaks is a generous portion each, so this serves three.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes on the range plus twenty-five in the oven will take inch-thick halibut well past done, and halibut is unforgiving — it goes dry and cottony fast. Modern practice is to pull it at 125–130°F internal, which for steaks this size means roughly 10–12 minutes in the oven after the initial stove-top heat.
- Oven temperatureThe original names none. A moderate oven, 350°F, suits this method; the fish is meant to steam gently under paper rather than brown.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, and one gill of water is 1/2 cup — just enough to come partway up the steaks and generate steam.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to fit inside the pan, buttered side down on the fish. It keeps the surface moist and stops the top drying while the liquid below simmers. Parchment is the closest match to what the recipe describes.
- A pan that goes both ways"Frying pan" here means a shallow pan used on the range and then in the oven. Use an ovenproof skillet or sauté pan wide enough to hold the steaks in one layer without crowding.
- Caper sauceThe book assumes you have it elsewhere: a white sauce or velouté, often built on butter, flour and stock or milk, finished with drained capers and sometimes lemon. Adding two tablespoons of the fish liquor is the point of the instruction — it carries the wine, parsley and lemon back into the sauce.
- Removing the spinal boneHalibut steaks are cut across the fish, so each has a section of backbone in the center. Once cooked it lifts out cleanly with the tip of a knife, leaving four neat quarters of flesh.
- SourcingPacific halibut is well managed and widely available. Atlantic halibut stocks have been badly depleted and are best avoided.
The name is trade language rather than cookery language: fishmongers and hotel buyers called the smaller halibut "chicken halibut" much as they said "chicken lobster" for a one-pounder, the word signaling young and tender rather than any resemblance to poultry. Halibut with caper sauce belongs to the standard Anglo-French repertoire of grand-hotel dining — capers, brined flower buds shipped from the Mediterranean, were one of the reliable pantry acids available to a professional kitchen before year-round citrus and fresh herbs, and they turn up again and again against boiled mutton, skate and white fish. The construction here, a shallow braise under buttered paper with the cooking liquor folded back into the sauce, is straight classical technique, and the terse instructions suggest a reader who very likely already had a caper sauce standing in the sauce station.