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Halibut, Caper Sauce
Procure two pieces of fresh halibut of one and a half pounds each, place in a frying pan, season with a teaspoon salt, a half teaspoon white pepper and a half gill white wine, a gill water and a half ounce butter. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on the range for five minutes, then set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, carefully place the fish on a dish; remove the spinal bones and keep warm. Heat in a small saucepan half ounce butter, mix in a heavy tablespoon flour, then pour in the fish liquor with half a gill of cream. Mix well, boil for five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream, add to the sauce, then continually mix for half minute. Strain the sauce through a cheesecloth into another small pan, add three tablespoons capers, mix well, then pour over the fish and serve.
A professional-kitchen method written in shorthand: the fish is oven-poached under paper in its own buttered liquor, and that liquor becomes the sauce. Two things need translating — the measures, and the fact that no oven temperature is given.
- The hinge: the egg yolkOnce the diluted yolk goes in, the sauce must not boil. Pull the pan to low heat or off it entirely and stir for the specified half minute; a rolling boil will scramble the yolk into grains that no amount of straining will rescue.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, a gill of water is 1/2 cup, and half a gill of cream for the sauce is another 1/4 cup.
- Ounces of butterHalf an ounce is one tablespoon — one for the fish, one for the roux. "A heavy tablespoon flour" means a generously rounded one, roughly 12 g, which with a tablespoon of butter binds the wine, water and cream the sauce takes — on the order of a cup before any reduction.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A moderate oven — in modern terms somewhere around 350–375F — suits oven-poaching under paper, and much hotter risks driving off the liquor and toughening the fish. The figure is a modern suggestion, not the book's.
- TimingTwenty minutes in the oven suits thick centre-cut steaks. Many modern cooks take halibut off at 130–135F at the thickest point, which on a 1-inch steak may be twelve to fifteen minutes. Halibut is lean and turns chalky quickly once past that.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche. Cut parchment to the size of the pan, butter one side, lay it directly on the fish. Use a pan that is safe to move from burner to oven — a cast-iron or steel skillet, or a shallow sauté pan.
- CapersThree tablespoons, drained. Brined capers can be added as they are; salt-packed capers should be rinsed and soaked, since the fish liquor is already seasoned with a full teaspoon of salt.
- YieldThree pounds of fish on the bone serves six as a main course, four generously.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era of the great hotel and restaurant chefs writing down their repertoire for American households, and this entry reads exactly like a line cook's note: quantities in gills and half-ounces, no oven temperature, and the assumption that the reader can build a velouté without being told what one is. Caper sauce was the standard accompaniment to plainly cooked fish and to boiled mutton throughout the nineteenth century — the capers, the pickled flower buds of the Mediterranean Capparis spinosa, supplied the sharpness that a butter-and-cream sauce needs. Halibut earned its place on hotel menus because it is firm enough to be lifted whole off the bone after cooking, as the recipe assumes. The technique here, poaching under buttered paper and then thickening the cooking liquor with a roux and an egg-yolk liaison, is classic French practice adapted to a home range.