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Halibut, Fleurette
Place three slices three-quarters of a pound each of chicken halibut in a sautoire with half ounce butter, two gills hot water, half gill white wine and a tablespoon good vinegar. Season with a teaspoon salt. Cover the fish with a buttered sheet of paper, boil for five minutes on the range, then place in a hot oven for ten minutes. Remove the fish with a skimmer from the pan, dress on a hot dish. Remove the spinal bones. Spread the Fleurette sauce over the fish and serve.
A straightforward braise-then-roast method for thick halibut steaks, written for a cook who already knows the sauce. Two details carry the dish: the buttered paper and the short total cooking time.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of hot water is 1 cup; half a gill of white wine is 2 fluid ounces, that is 1/4 cup or 4 tablespoons.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the three steaks in one layer without crowding. Any shallow ovenproof pan of similar size works; the liquid should come partway up the fish, not cover it.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. The pan goes in uncovered except for the paper, and the ten minutes is meant to finish the fish, not to reduce the liquid.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down, laid directly on the fish. It traps steam and keeps the exposed surface from drying while the oven does its work.
- Chicken halibutA market term for a small young halibut, generally under about 20 lb, prized for finer flake. Ask for center-cut steaks about 1 to 1 1/4 inches thick; three-quarters of a pound each includes the bone.
- Total timeFive minutes on the range plus ten in the oven is close to right for steaks this thick, but check rather than trust the clock. Pull the fish at 130-135F at the bone; halibut is very lean and turns chalky within a few degrees of overcooking.
- Spinal bonesLift the steaks with a wide slotted spatula, then slide the point of a knife around the center bone and lift it out with the surrounding cartilage. Doing this while the fish is hot keeps the flakes intact.
- Fleurette sauceNot given on this page. The name suggests a cream-finished white sauce built on fish liquor or velouté; if so, the poaching liquid here, strained and reduced, would be the natural base for it.
- YieldThree portions, one steak each, and the dish wants a plain starch and something green rather than a second sauce.
The International Cook Book came out of the world of the great American hotel and restaurant kitchens, where French service vocabulary was simply the professional language: a sautoire, a skimmer, and a sauce named in French with no explanation, because the cook reading it was assumed to have the sauce chapter at hand. Fleurette means "little flower," and in French kitchen usage crème fleurette is thin, unsoured pouring cream, which is generally taken to be the point of the name here: a pale cream sauce over a pale fish. The technique is probably older than the name. Cooking fish under a buttered paper in a small amount of acidulated liquid, then finishing it in the oven, is often described as a characteristic nineteenth-century method for firm white steaks, and the splash of vinegar does real work, firming the albumen and keeping the flesh white. Pacific halibut is the sound choice at a modern counter.