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Codfish Saute, Lyonnaise
Season three fresh codfish steaks of three-quarters of a pound each with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add two finely sliced white onions, gently brown for five minutes, place in the steaks one beside another, and briskly fry four minutes on each side. Set in oven to bake for ten minutes, remove, dress on a hot dish, pour two tablespoons vinegar and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley in pan, mix well, pour over fish and serve.
A straightforward pan-to-oven fish dish whose only real trap is time: the combined eight minutes of frying plus ten in the oven will take a modern fillet well past done. Judge by the fish, not the clock.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, and the recipe says only "set in oven"; no oven description of any kind is offered. A moderate oven, around 375F, is a reasonable modern choice for a ten-minute finish. The fish is presumably left in the pan, since the pan is used again for the vinegar, so use a skillet with an ovenproof handle.
- Cook to doneness, not to the minuteThree-quarter-pound cod steaks are thick, bone-in cross-sections, and eighteen minutes total suits them. Modern boneless loin or fillet portions of the same weight are thinner and will be done at 130-135F internal, when the flesh just separates into flakes. Skip or shorten the oven stage accordingly.
- Cod steaksCross-cut steaks with the backbone in are uncommon at most counters now. Ask the fishmonger to cut them from a large fish, or substitute thick centre-cut loin pieces, which hold together better in a hot pan than tail-end fillet.
- "Saute, Lyonnaise"Lyonnaise means onions, and they are the point. The recipe calls for white onions; slice them thinly and evenly so they brown in the five minutes allotted. If they threaten to scorch once the fish goes in, push them under and around the steaks.
- ButterA tablespoon and a half in a pan holding over two pounds of fish is lean, and the onions will take up some of it. Add a little more, or a spoonful of neutral oil, to keep the fish from sticking during the brisk fry.
- The vinegar finishThis is a fast deglaze in a pan that is still hot from the oven. Plain white wine or cider vinegar is right; two tablespoons over three steaks reads sharp on paper but reduces and rounds out against the butter and onion. Swirl it until it thickens slightly, then pour at once.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for two and a quarter pounds of fish is in the normal range, but the pepper is assertive. Season the steaks on both sides and let them sit a few minutes before they meet the pan.
- YieldThree steaks, three servings, with a starch and a green vegetable. The onions and pan sauce are the whole accompaniment, so boiled potatoes are the natural partner.
Anything labelled lyonnaise in a French-derived kitchen means onions, after the cooking of Lyon, where the onion is treated as a principal ingredient rather than a background aromatic; the term attaches to potatoes, tripe, eggs and, as here, fish. The dish belongs to a large family of hotel and restaurant preparations in which a plainly cooked protein is finished in its own pan with a splash of acid and chopped parsley, a technique that gave a cook a sauce in thirty seconds without a stockpot. Fresh cod, specified in contrast to the salt cod that dominated so many nineteenth-century fish chapters, is often connected to the improved rail and ice transport that is said to have made fresh sea fish an ordinary item inland by the early twentieth century. The recipe, with its brisk frying times and its terse direction to set the fish in the oven, reads exactly like a line cook's note set down for a domestic reader.