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Koulibiac of Salmon
Prepare a brioche paste and keep on a plate till required. Remove skin and bones from one and a half pounds fresh salmon, cut in half-inch strips, place on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, turning pieces well in seasoning, and keep on plate. Finely chop, separately, three hard-boiled eggs, a heavy pinch fennel, two branches parsley, an onion and eight well-cleaned, fresh medium mushrooms. Cook two ounces buckwheat flour and a half pint broth, seasoned with a half teaspoon salt, for ten minutes in a small saucepan, mixing once in a while. Thoroughly heat an ounce butter in a saucepan, add onions and mushrooms and fry for five minutes, tossing once in a while. Add eggs, fennel and parsley, mix all well together, add buckwheat, gently mix, then transfer to an earthen tureen and let cool. Roll the brioche paste on a lightly floured table to one-fifth-inch thickness giving it a square form. Lay paste on a cloth, carefully spread preparation in a long, square shape, neatly lay strips salmon over, lightly egg edges of paste and fold up both sides so as to entirely enclose preparation. With aid of cloth turn the koulibiac into a lightly buttered pastry pan, folded part down, and let raise for thirty minutes. Spread over it two tablespoons melted butter, evenly dredge over two tablespoons cornmeal flour, and set in oven for an hour and thirty minutes. Remove, make a small opening in centre of top, pour in three tablespoons melted butter, let rest for ten minutes, cut in half-inch-thick slices, dress on a dish and serve.
A full koulibiac is a day's project: an enriched yeast dough, a cooked filling that must be cold before it meets the pastry, and a long bake. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: cool the filling completelyThe instruction to transfer the mushroom-egg-buckwheat mixture to an earthen tureen and let it cool is not optional. Warm filling melts the butter in the brioche and the dough slumps and leaks along the seam during the thirty-minute rise.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A yeasted loaf of this size wants 375F, and at ninety minutes the crust will be very dark unless you tent it with foil after the first forty-five minutes. Check the centre with a probe: 145F at the salmon is done.
- Ninety minutes is long for salmonThe fish is protected by a thick jacket of dough and cold filling, so it steams rather than roasts, but half-inch strips of modern farmed salmon will be dry well before an hour and a half is up. Bake to internal temperature rather than to the clock.
- Brioche pasteThe book assumes you have a standard enriched yeast dough on hand: roughly flour, eggs, butter at about half the flour's weight, milk, yeast and a little sugar and salt, mixed and given a slow cold rise. Chilled dough rolls to the specified one-fifth inch far more easily than room-temperature dough.
- Half pint brothEight fluid ounces, one US cup. Cooked ten minutes with two ounces of buckwheat flour it makes a thick, porridge-like binder rather than a loose sauce. Many koulibiac recipes use whole buckwheat groats (kasha) or rice instead; the flour version here is smoother and holds the filling together more tightly.
- FennelA heavy pinch of the herb, meaning the feathery fronds; dill is often used in Russian versions of this dish. Not fennel seed, and not the bulb.
- Cornmeal flourFinely ground cornmeal or corn flour, dredged over the buttered top for colour and a slight crunch. Semolina does the same job.
- The butter poured in at the endThree tablespoons through a hole in the crust after baking is the classic finish; it seasons the filling and keeps the slices from tasting dry. Let it rest the full ten minutes so the butter distributes before cutting.
- YieldA pound and a half of salmon in a brioche case makes a substantial loaf, enough for six to eight as a main course.
Kulebyaka is a Russian pie of fish or meat in a tall enriched crust, layered with grain, hard-boiled egg, onion and mushroom, and it reached western restaurant kitchens through the French appetite for Russian service in the nineteenth century. The French took the word as coulibiac and the dish as a showpiece, and it turns up in professional English- and French-language cookbooks of the early twentieth century in more or less this form. Buckwheat kasha is one traditional filler, though rice is equally well established, and the grain soaks up the fish juices that would otherwise turn the crust to paste. The layer of vesiga, dried sturgeon spinal marrow, that appears in the grandest Russian versions has quietly vanished here, as it has from nearly every modern rendering.