Home › The World's Kitchen › Halibut, Portugaise
Halibut, Portugaise
Procure three three-quarter-pound slices fresh halibut and place in a sautoire with half ounce butter, half gill white wine, a gill water, branch parsley, tablespoon vinegar, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover fish with a buttered paper, boil five minutes, remove, lift up fish and dress on hot dish. Strain fish gravy into a small saucepan and let reduce until nearly dry, then add one and a half gills tomato sauce, a saltspoon cayenne pepper, mix well, let briskly boil for ten minutes, pour sauce over fish and serve.
A short shallow-poach with a reduced tomato sauce, written in the measures of a professional kitchen around 1906. The numbers translate cleanly once you know the vessels and the spoons.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup and a gill of water is 1/2 cup; the gill and a half of tomato sauce is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, making the pepper about 3/4 teaspoon.
- The sautoireA straight-sided shallow pan, not a casserole dish. Any wide skillet or saute pan that holds the three steaks in one layer with the liquid coming a third of the way up will do.
- Cayenne, in proportionA saltspoon of cayenne into 3/4 cup of sauce is assertive but not reckless. Start with half that if you are unsure of how hot your cayenne is.
- Don't actually boil itThe single instruction worth overriding. Halibut is lean and turns dry and fibrous at a rolling boil; bring the liquid to a bare simmer with the buttered paper on top and hold it there.
- Five minutes is shortThree-quarter-pound steaks can run an inch or more thick and will need closer to 8-10 minutes at a simmer, until the flesh is just opaque at the bone. Five minutes will only suffice for a thin slice.
- The buttered paperA cartouche, cut to the pan's diameter and buttered on the side facing the fish. It keeps the exposed surface moist without trapping enough steam to overcook, and it is worth the thirty seconds it takes.
- Tomato sauce means a cooked sauceIn books of this period that generally means a smooth tomato-and-stock sauce rather than a pasta sauce or ketchup. A plain passata reduced with a little stock and butter is the nearest supermarket stand-in.
- Watch the reductionReducing the poaching liquid "nearly dry" then boiling ten minutes more will over-thicken a modern sauce and can catch and scorch. Five to six minutes of brisk boiling is usually enough to bring it to coating consistency.
- YieldThree servings, one steak each. The fish cools fast under a sauce, so warm the platter.
"Portugaise" is a term of classical French kitchen shorthand rather than a claim of Portuguese origin: in the Escoffier-era repertoire it signals tomato, usually with onion and garlic. Explanations that link the name to the tomato's Iberian associations are traditional rather than documented. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe has the shape of professional kitchen shorthand: exact weights of fish, liquid measured in gills, brief timings, and a sauce finished at the last moment. Halibut appears frequently on American hotel menus of the period, and a firm white steak survives poaching and plating better than a delicate flatfish fillet.