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Halibut, Bangor
Place in a mortar one sound, peeled shallot, two branches parsley and a branch chervil, pound these to a pulp, add a half ounce good butter, pound again for a minute, then strain through a sieve into a bowl and keep in a cool place till required. Place three three-quarter-pound halibut steaks in a frying pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, moisten with a gill good, strong cider; add half ounce of butter. Cover the fish with a buttered paper, boil for five minutes, then set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress the steaks on a hot dish and keep hot. Mix in a small saucepan a tablespoon melted butter with a tablespoon of flour. Add the fish gravy to this with a half gill hot milk. Mix with the wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Then add the green butter, bit by bit, continually mixing while adding it; add a good tablespoon fresh, finely grated horseradish, mix a little, then pour the sauce over the fish and serve.
A straightforward braised fish with a compound-butter velouté; the only real difficulties are the old measures and the cooking time, which is long by current standards.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is 1/2 cup, so the cider is 1/2 cup and the milk 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making the pepper roughly 1/2 teaspoon.
- Cut the oven timeTwenty minutes in the oven after five minutes of boiling will overcook three-quarter-pound steaks by modern taste. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no thickness; at a moderate oven a steak of this size will likely be done well before twenty minutes. Check early; halibut is lean and turns cottony fast.
- The green butter is the pointAdd it off the heat, or at the barest simmer, a small piece at a time while stirring. If the sauce boils after the butter goes in, the emulsion breaks and the herbs turn drab olive.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan's diameter and rubbed with butter. It keeps the fish moist without sealing the pan the way foil does.
- Mortar optionalThe shallot, parsley and chervil can be minced very fine and mashed into softened butter with a fork, or worked in a small food processor. The straining step is only to remove fibrous bits; skip it if the mince is fine.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Substitute a little tarragon plus extra parsley rather than dried chervil, which has almost no flavour.
- HorseradishFreshly grated root is meant here. Prepared horseradish in vinegar will work but add it at the end and taste, as the acid can thin the sauce's flavour.
- CiderThe recipe asks for 'good, strong cider', which suggests hard cider; period American usage could mean either sweet or fermented. Either works; hard cider gives a sharper sauce.
- YieldThree steaks of about 12 oz each serve three generously or four with sides.
Cider was the everyday drink and cooking liquid of New England farms long before wine became usual in American kitchens. Substituting cider for the white wine of a French braise is exactly the sort of translation that fills this book, which dresses up regional cooking in professional restaurant technique - here a roux-thickened gravy finished with a compound butter of shallot and herbs. The horseradish points the same way: it was a common kitchen-garden root in the Northeast and served with fish and beef alike.