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Halibut, Vert-Pre
Procure three three-quarter-pound slices fresh chicken halibut and place them in a frying pan with an ounce butter, a gill white wine, branch parsley, juice of a quarter lemon, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover the fish with a buttered paper, boil on range for five minutes, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, carefully lift up fish with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish and reduce gravy to half the quantity on the fire. Have a vert-pre sauce ready, strain the fish liquor into it, mix well, then pour over fish and serve.
A shallow-braised fish course from Filippini's kitchen, written for cooks who already knew what a vert-pré sauce was and how long a halibut steak really wants. The cooking time is the one number to ignore.
- The cooking timeFive minutes on the range plus twenty-five in the oven will leave three-quarter-pound steaks dry and flaking apart. In a 375F oven, covered with the buttered paper, steaks that thick are done in 10 to 14 minutes, at an internal temperature of about 130-135F at the bone. Judge by the flesh just losing its translucency.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only 'set in oven,' and printed oven temperatures were not yet usual in books of this date. A moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, is a reasonable modern reading for a covered braise like this.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Use a dry white wine with some acid to it; the quarter lemon is there for the same reason and both are needed since the sauce is finished with the reduced liquor.
- "Chicken halibut"Trade term for a small young halibut, roughly 10 to 20 lb, prized for finer flesh than the enormous fish. Any thick halibut steak or a center-cut loin portion works; substitute turbot, cod loin or thick haddock if halibut is scarce or expensive.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface from drying while letting the liquid reduce, which a tight lid will not do.
- Vert-pré sauceVert-pre sauce -- Filippini gives it elsewhere in the book rather than here. In nineteenth-century French usage vert-pre is most often a garnish name, but green herb preparations under that name -- parsley, chervil, tarragon and often spinach, blanched, squeezed dry and pounded to a puree, then worked into a butter sauce or a velouty -- are the usual reading. Make it before the fish goes in the oven, and strain the reduced fish liquor in while it is warm.
- Don't let the sauce boil after mixingIf the sauce is butter-based, adding hot fish liquor and then reheating hard will break it. Combine off direct heat and serve at once.
- Equipment and yieldA skimmer here means a wide slotted fish slice; the steaks will want support to come out whole. Three steaks of this size serve three generously or six as a course within a larger menu.
Vert-pre -- "green meadow" -- is one of the standard nineteenth-century French garnish names, used for anything set off by green: grilled meat with watercress and straw potatoes, or, as here, a fish dressed with a herb-green sauce. Alexander Filippini, whose role at Delmonico's in New York is usually given as chef, steward and manager, compiled The International Cook Book as a working reference for a professional repertoire, which is why the entry names a sauce rather than explaining it and gives weights of fish rather than servings. Halibut appears constantly in American books of the period: the North Atlantic and Pacific fisheries were sending it inland by rail and ice, and its firm steaks stood up to braising, broiling and the elaborate sauced treatments a hotel kitchen liked. The technique itself, fish cooked in a little wine and butter under buttered paper with the liquor reduced into the sauce, is a method often described as a braise a blanc.