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Halibut, St. Augustine
Procure two slices very fresh halibut of one and a half pounds each. Slice exceedingly fine three small white onions, place them in a frying pan with half ounce melted butter and carefully cook without browning for six minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Place the steaks in the pan over the onions. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Peel and cut into quarters four medium red tomatoes and place around the fish. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, cover the pan, place on the fire and boil for five minutes. Set the pan in the oven and bake for fifteen minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, take up the fish with a skimmer, dress on a dish, pour all the contents of the pan over the halibut and serve.
A straightforward braise of thick halibut steaks over a bed of sweated onion and tomato, finished in the oven under a paper lid. The method is sound; the original simply assumes you know your own stove.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the book predates thermostats. Use 375-400F, which will hold the pan liquid at a lively simmer for the fifteen minutes specified.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist and stops the tomato from scorching. Parchment is the closest modern equivalent to the original kitchen paper; foil will also work, though being impermeable it traps more steam.
- Pan choiceYou need a lidded, oven-safe skillet or shallow braiser wide enough to hold both steaks flat without overlapping, roughly 12 inches. The recipe moves from stovetop to oven in one vessel.
- "Boil for five minutes"There is no added liquid, so what boils is the juice from the onions and tomatoes. If your tomatoes are dry, add two or three tablespoons of water, fish stock or dry white wine so the pan does not go dry before it reaches the oven.
- Timing and donenessTwo slices of a pound and a half each means steaks well over an inch thick. Twenty minutes total is right for that; thinner supermarket steaks will be done in ten to twelve. Pull the fish at 130-135F at the bone, when the flesh just separates into flakes. Halibut is lean and turns dry and cottony within a few degrees of overcooking.
- MeasuresHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. A teaspoon of salt for three pounds of fish is correct seasoning, not a misprint.
- A skimmerHere it means a flat perforated lifter. A wide fish spatula does the job; the steaks are heavy and will break if lifted from one point.
- YieldThree pounds of fish plus the vegetables serves four generously, six if it follows a soup course as it would have in 1906.
- SourcingAtlantic halibut stocks have not recovered and the fish is generally avoided; Pacific halibut is the usual substitute, and thick-cut cod or hake works in the same braise.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a dish was christened after a city, a hotel or a patron and the name carried the whole story. St. Augustine, Florida, was the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States and by the 1900s a winter resort of some polish, served by Flagler's railroad and his hotels; halibut, onion and tomato cooked together under paper is a plausible nod to the Spanish and Minorcan cooking that had shaped the town's kitchens for generations, though the attribution is the kind of resort-menu flourish that is asserted rather than documented. What is not decorative is the technique: sweating onions without color, laying fish on the bed rather than in liquid, and sealing with a buttered cartouche is classic French restaurant practice, transplanted more or less unchanged into an American book and given an American place-name.