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Fish Scallops Au Gratin
Peel off skin, remove the bones and cut in half-inch-square pieces one and a half pounds very fresh halibut, place in a frying pan with gill white wine, half ounce butter, one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on range for five minutes, then set in oven six minutes. Mix in a saucepan one and a half ounces butter with two ounces flour and heat for one minute, stirring meanwhile. Pour in the fish liquor, one gill milk and one gill cream, thoroughly mix until it comes to a boil, then boil for five minutes; add fish with two tablespoons sherry, one teaspoon anchovy essence, and gently mix and cook for five minutes. Pour the whole into a baking dish, sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, set in oven to bake for ten minutes, remove and serve.
N. B. Any left-over fish can be utilized instead of the fresh.
A Delmonico's-style creamed fish gratin, written in ounces and gills for a cook who was expected to know the oven by feel. The instructions cook the halibut three separate times, which is the one thing to manage.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so the wine, the milk and the cream are each 4 fl oz. The butter measures come to about 1 tablespoon for the poaching and 3 tablespoons for the roux; 2 oz flour is a scant half cup by weight, not volume.
- Oven temperatureNone is given anywhere in the recipe. A moderate oven, around 375F, will serve for both the six-minute finish and the ten-minute browning; a hotter final bake risks the cream sauce separating at the edges.
- Don't cook the fish three timesDon't cook the fish four times -- As written the halibut gets 5 minutes on the range, 6 in the oven, 5 more in the sauce and 10 under the cheese. Poach it only until the cubes turn opaque at the edges, roughly 3 minutes total, then fold it into the finished sauce off the heat and let the final bake do the rest. Halibut is lean and turns dry and chalky quickly.
- "Scallops" means no scallopsThe word here is the old sense of escalloped or scalloped -- fish in a cream sauce, browned. Nothing bivalve is involved.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist and the liquor from reducing away in five minutes.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled condiment, thinner and saltier than modern anchovy paste. Use about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a teaspoon of Worcestershire, and taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt called for earlier.
- Fish liquorStrain it before it goes into the roux. Five minutes of boiling on the sauce is right for cooking out the flour, but stir constantly once the cream is in.
- Yield and dishServes four as a main course, six in individual gratin dishes or scallop shells. Shallow is better than deep -- more browned surface per portion.
The International Cook Book (1906) is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe carries the marks of that kitchen: French method, English condiments, Italian cheese. Au gratin simply describes the browned crust, and the roux-and-cream base is closer to a white sauce or velouté enriched with the fish's own cooking liquor. Halibut was cheap and plentiful on the Pacific coast in 1906, which is why it appears here as the default rather than the luxury it has become. The closing note about using up leftover fish is the honest part of the recipe: the N.B. offers the gratin as a way to make yesterday's boiled fish worth serving again, and the sherry, anchovy and Parmesan are there to give it back a savour it had lost.