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Halibut Steaks with Brown Butter
Procure three three-quarter-pound chicken halibut steaks, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and lightly baste with a little cold milk and roll in flour. Heat one and a half teaspoons melted butter in a frying pan, arrange the steaks in and fry for five minutes on each side, then set in oven for six minutes, remove, dress on a dish and divide a half tablespoon butter on top. Pour a tablespoon vinegar in fish pan, add a very little butter, toss well on fire until a nice brown colour, pour over fish and serve.
A straightforward pan-fried fish with a vinegar-sharpened brown butter, written for a cook who already knew what those quantities meant. Two things need attention: the fat is under-measured and the total cooking time is long by current standards.
- Chicken halibutNot poultry — the trade term for a small young halibut, whose steaks are thinner and finer-grained than those from a large fish; the weight implied by the term varied from market to market. Any halibut steak of roughly three-quarters of a pound, about an inch thick, stands in. Turbot steaks behave much the same way.
- The butter is too littleOne and a half teaspoons will not film a pan holding three steaks, and the flour coating will scorch in patches. Two to three tablespoons of butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil to raise the smoke point, gives the even browning the recipe assumes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe offers no oven term to interpret either. A hot oven suits a six-minute finish. Use an ovenproof skillet and move the whole pan across rather than transferring the fish.
- Total timeFive minutes a side plus six in the oven is sixteen minutes for an inch-thick steak, which will leave halibut dry and chalky — it is a lean fish with little insurance. Three to four minutes a side and a few minutes in the oven is nearer the mark; pull it at 130-135F at the bone, when the flesh just parts.
- The milk and flourThe cold-milk baste is there to make the flour cling and to encourage colour. Flour immediately before frying, not in advance, or the coating turns to paste.
- The brown butterButter taken past foaming to a brown, sharpened with vinegar; the sauce is a relative of the classic beurre noir served with skate. Note that the recipe pours the vinegar into the pan first and browns the butter in it. If instead you brown the butter first, add the vinegar away from the flame and swirl, as it will spit. Once the milk solids go past brown to black the sauce turns bitter.
- VinegarA plain white wine or cider vinegar suits it; white distilled vinegar is harsher.
- YieldThree steaks of three-quarters of a pound each serve three generously, or four if the fish is filleted off the bone before plating.
Brown butter with vinegar is one of the oldest surviving fish sauces in French cooking, standard with skate as raie au beurre noir and applied by extension to any firm white fish; the acid cuts the richness of the fat and does the work a squeeze of lemon does in later kitchens. Its appearance here reflects the ambitions of a large American hotel-trained repertoire, in a period when steaks cut across the bone were the ordinary retail form. The instruction to "procure three three-quarter-pound chicken halibut steaks" is the voice of the professional kitchen rather than the home cook emready temperature.