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Salmon, Baltimore
Place three slices fresh salmon, three-quarters of a pound each, in a frying pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, adding a gill white wine, a gill cold water and half ounce butter. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on the fire for two minutes, then set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress the salmon on a hot dish, then take out bones from the centre and keep warm.
Add eighteen freshly opened oysters to the fish liquor, boil for three minutes on the range; lift up the oysters with the skimmer and place six on top of each slice of fish. Reduce the fish gravy to about half gill, then pour in one gill hot demi-glace. Mix well and let briskly boil for five minutes. Strain the gravy over the fish and serve.
A Delmonico-style braise: the salmon poaches gently in wine under paper, and its liquor becomes the sauce. Two numbers in the original need adjusting for modern taste.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe uses a gill of white wine, a gill of water, and later a gill of demi-glace, reduced from the fish liquor to about a quarter cup before the demi-glace goes in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, suits a covered pan of fish; the point is steady gentle heat, not browning.
- The cooking timeTwenty minutes at 350F will take a 3/4 lb steak well past the point where salmon stays moist. Cook to 125-130F at the thickest part, which is nearer 10-12 minutes for a steak an inch and a half thick, and start checking early.
- The oystersThree minutes in boiling liquor shrinks them and turns them firm. Drop them into the reduced liquor off the boil and give them 60-90 seconds, just until the edges ruffle, then lift them out.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the top from drying while letting a little steam escape. Foil works but traps more moisture.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened classically with espagnole. Good tubs and frozen concentrates are sold now; a well-reduced homemade brown stock is the honest substitute. Salt only at the end, since demi-glace and oyster liquor are both salty.
- Salmon slicesThree-quarters of a pound each means cross-cut steaks on the bone, which is why the recipe has you lift out the centre bone after cooking. Center-cut fillet portions of 5-6 oz work and skip that step.
- YieldThree generous servings as written, or six if the steaks are split after boning. Six oysters and a spoonful of sauce per portion.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose books are full of dishes tagged with place names in the French restaurant manner: a la Baltimore, a la Newburg, a la Creole. Here the Baltimore tag goes with oysters, the city having been the great shucking and canning centre for Chesapeake Bay through the second half of the nineteenth century, when Maryland packers shipped oysters by the barrel and the rail car across the country. Pairing them with salmon and a brown demi-glace is pure hotel-kitchen logic rather than any regional tradition: the fish is braised in wine, its liquor poaches the oysters, and the same liquor is reduced and fortified into the sauce, so nothing made in the pan is thrown away. Whether Baltimore cooks ever served the dish is doubtful; the name was a menu convenience, and it tells you mainly how cheap and abundant East Coast oysters still were in Filippini's day.