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Halibut, Hollandaise
Place three slices fresh halibut of three-quarters of a pound each in a frying pan, add half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, a half gill white wine, half gill water, two branches parsley and juice of quarter of a sound lemon. Cover fish with lightly buttered paper, boil on range for five minutes, then bake in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, take up fish with skimmer, dress on a hot dish, pour one tablespoon fish liquor in a Hollandaise sauce, mix a little, pour sauce over fish and serve.
A classic shallow braise: the fish poaches in a little wine and its own juices under a paper lid, and the liquor goes into the sauce. The measurements are pre-1910 restaurant shorthand.
- The unitsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of white wine and the same of water. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons about 3/4 teaspoon of pepper — heavy by current taste for three pieces of fish; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; period ranges had no thermostat and the book leaves the heat to the cook's judgement. Around 350–375F is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes on the range plus twenty-five in the oven will take a 3/4 lb halibut steak well past done, and halibut is lean enough to go dry and chalky fast. Slices of that size need roughly 10–15 minutes total in the oven after the liquid comes to a simmer; pull them when the flesh just separates into flakes at the thickest point.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche — a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down on the fish. It traps steam and keeps the top from drying without sealing the pan the way a lid does. Parchment does the job; foil is a poor substitute here because it can react with the wine and lemon.
- Pan and fish"Frying pan" means an ovenproof skillet or shallow braising pan, not a nonstick sauté pan. Skin-on steaks hold together better; lift them with a wide slotted spatula rather than the "skimmer" the original assumes.
- The sauceThe hollandaise is presumed known; a book of this kind would give it elsewhere. The tablespoon of strained cooking liquor thinned into it is the whole point of the dish: it carries the wine, lemon and parsley back into the sauce. Add it warm, off the heat, or the emulsion will break.
- YieldThree steaks of 3/4 lb each serve three generously, or six if you cut each in half after cooking, which is the tidier plating.
Halibut with hollandaise belongs to the Franco-American hotel repertoire that Alexander Filippini, formerly of Delmonico's in New York, was writing up for home readers around the turn of the twentieth century. The method — fish set in a pan with butter, wine, water, parsley and lemon, covered with buttered paper and finished in the oven — is essentially the white-wine braise of French practice, and slackening the hollandaise with a spoonful of the resulting liquor is the restaurant habit of wasting nothing flavourful. Halibut was not a prized fish in early New England, but ice and rail transport helped make fresh halibut steaks a staple of American city tables in the later nineteenth century; firm enough to be cut and served like meat, it appears often under rich egg sauces in books of this period.