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Filet of Halibut, Chevreuse
Procure a three-pound piece of the tail part of a fresh halibut, split in two, remove spinal bone and skin, then cut each half in three slanting equal pieces. Neatly flatten, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, fold in two and lightly beat with the blade of a knife. Pare them to heart-shaped forms, place in a lightly buttered sautoire, add half gill white wine, gill water, branch parsley, juice of a quarter lemon and three saltspoons salt. Cover fish with a buttered paper, boil for five minutes, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, carefully lift up filets and dress on a hot dish, crown-like. Reduce gravy on range to a glaze, then pour in one and a half gills tomato sauce mix well and let boil for eight minutes. Shift pan to corner of range, incorporate little by little half ounce butter, sharply mixing with whisk while adding, strain sauce over fish and serve.
A classical poach-and-glaze treatment of halibut, written when fish was routinely cooked far longer than we would now. One timing needs rethinking; the rest translates cleanly.
- The oven time is the hingeFive minutes on the stove plus twenty-five in the oven will leave halibut dry and flaking apart — it is a lean fish that sets at about 130-135F internal. Folded pieces of this thickness need roughly 8-10 minutes total in a covered pan; check the thickest fold and stop when it is just opaque.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, a gill of water 1/2 cup, and one and a half gills of tomato sauce 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Oven heatFilippini does not name a temperature; the recipe only says to set the pan in the oven. For a covered dish of fish, a moderate oven of around 350F is a reasonable modern reading, but the figure is ours, not his.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan, wide enough to hold the six pieces in one layer without crowding — a 10 or 12-inch saute pan does the job. Crowding steams the fish unevenly.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It holds in steam while letting the liquid reduce, which a tight lid will not do.
- SaltA teaspoon on the fish plus three saltspoons in the pan liquid is heavy by current taste, and the tomato sauce adds more. Season the fillets lightly and salt the finished sauce at the end.
- Finishing the sauce"Shift pan to corner of range" means off direct heat. The butter is whisked in off the boil so it emulsifies rather than splitting — if the sauce breaks, it has been too hot.
- YieldThree pounds of tail-end halibut gives six heart-shaped pieces, enough for six as a fish course or three to four as a main.
- SourcingAtlantic halibut stocks are depleted and it is best avoided; Pacific halibut is the usual substitute, and thick cod or hake loin behaves similarly in this preparation.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style of the period: French technique, French nomenclature, and a garnish name doing the work of a description. The name Chevreuse is usually taken to point to the town and former duchy south-west of Paris, one of a large family of nineteenth-century garnish names drawn from aristocratic titles and estates — Soubise, Dubarry, Conde — where the name told a trained kitchen what to put on the plate and told the diner nothing at all. The method itself is a straightforward shallow poach: cook in a little wine and water under buttered paper, then reduce the cooking liquor to a glaze and build the sauce on it, so nothing of the fish's flavour is thrown away. Serving the fillets "crown-like" in a ring, with the sauce strained over, belongs to the same era of formal service, when a fish course arrived on a hot dish rather than a plate.