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Halibut, Mornay
Marinade and cook three pounds very fresh halibut, cut in three slices, exactly the same as for bass. Have one tablespoon melted butter in a small saucepan; add two tablespoons flour, mix and heat well and pour in one gill hot milk and five tablespoons "fish gravy." Stir well, season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper; add one ounce grated Swiss cheese and one raw egg yolk. Briskly stir and let slowly cook for three minutes. Place the halibut on a dish, remove the spine bone; place six heads canned mushrooms on top of the fish, pour the sauce over the halibut. Sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese on the surface, arrange a few little bits of butter over all. Place in a hot oven to bake for ten minutes, or until of a golden colour. Remove it from the oven, decorate with six heart-shape croutons around the dish. Sprinkle a very little finely chopped parsley over and serve hot.
A classic Mornay built on the fish's own poaching liquor. The recipe assumes you have already read the bass entry, and it assumes you know that a yolk-enriched sauce must never boil.
- The hinge: the egg yolkOnce the yolk goes in, keep the sauce below a simmer for its three minutes. If it boils it will curdle into grains, and no amount of whisking brings it back.
- "Same as for bass"The bass entry is not reproduced here, so its treatment has to be read across from that page; in general it will mean a short marinade and a gentle poach rather than a hard boil. Cook the slices only until the flesh just parts from the bone.
- "Fish gravy"The quotation marks point to a preparation defined elsewhere in the book; in practice the strained poaching liquid, reduced a little for flavour, answers. Five tablespoons is all this sauce takes.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon salt and an eighth teaspoon cayenne, which is assertive; taste before committing, since the two cheeses and the fish liquor both bring salt.
- Swiss cheeseAn ounce of Gruyere or a firm Emmental, grated, roughly a quarter cup packed. Pre-shredded "Swiss" with anti-caking starch will not melt as cleanly.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" -- The book gives no temperature; in modern terms a hot oven is somewhere around 425-450F. Ten minutes is only to glaze the surface, since the fish is already cooked; watch it and pull it when the top is golden rather than waiting out the clock. A short pass under the broiler does the same work.
- Canned mushrooms"Six heads" means whole button caps. Drain and pat them dry, or use fresh caps sauteed in butter until their water has cooked off, since wet mushrooms thin the sauce.
- Croutons and yieldHeart-shaped croutons are bread cut with a cutter and fried in clarified butter; cut them before the sauce is made so they are crisp at serving. Three pounds of halibut serves four to six.
Mornay is a bechamel finished with grated cheese, one of the small family of nineteenth-century French mother-sauce derivatives, and the name is generally traced to the Mornay family, though which member it honours has never been settled and the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The pairing here is orthodox: Gruyere melted into the sauce for body and stretch, Parmesan scattered on top because it browns and does not run. Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the working economy of a professional brigade rather than a home cook: the halibut is poached, the poaching liquor becomes the sauce, and the whole dish is glazed to order in a hot oven. The cross-reference to the bass recipe, the canned mushrooms and the cut croutons all belong to the same restaurant habit of mind, in which components are prepared in advance and assembled at the pass.