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Salmon, Bateliere
Place three slices fresh salmon of three-quarters of a pound each on a dish, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, juice of half a sound lemon, teaspoon anchovy essence and leaves of two branches chervil, repeatedly turn salmon in seasoning, then let infuse until required. Have one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add twelve even-sized, very small white onions, brown a nice golden colour, then add two tablespoons flour, lightly stir and cook for one minute. Pour in one gill claret and two gills pure tomato juice, mix well, let boil for fifteen minutes, place salmon and seasoning in a frying pan and add twelve cooked, shelled shrimps. Take up onions with a skimmer from sauce, place them with salmon, strain sauce over, cover with a lightly buttered paper boil for five minutes on range, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, lift up paper, dress salmon on a dish, one overlapping another, pour contents of pan over and serve.
A matelote-style treatment scaled for three thick salmon steaks. The one thing to change is the cooking time: the sauce is the point, and it can be built exactly as written, but salmon held thirty minutes in a hot pan will be dry and chalky.
- The timing is the hingeFive minutes on the stove plus twenty-five in the oven assumes fish cooked to falling-apart doneness. A 1-inch salmon steak is done at 125-130F at the centre, which takes roughly 10-12 minutes in a 350F oven under the paper. Make the sauce first, simmer it its full fifteen minutes so the flour cooks out, then give the fish only as long as it needs.
- GillsA gill is half a cup by the usual American reckoning (the British gill is 5 fl oz, a little more). So roughly half a cup of claret and a cup of tomato juice, which is a fairly loose sauce for three steaks; it will tighten as it bakes.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Moderate, 350F, is right here i the dish is really finishing a braise, not roasting.
- Anchovy essenceA thin bottled anchovy extract, hard to find in many places now though still sold in Britain. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a teaspoon of colatura or good fish sauce, gives the same salty-savoury lift. Cut the added salt if you substitute, since the substitutes are usually saltier.
- ClaretPeriod shorthand for red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red of moderate tannin works; avoid anything jammy or heavily oaked, which turns bitter against the tomato.
- The shrimpsThey are already cooked, so they only need warming. Add them for the last two or three minutes rather than at the start, or they will be tough by the time the fish is done.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the food. It keeps the exposed salmon from drying and lets the sauce reduce slowly. Foil is not the same thing i it seals too well.
- The onionsVery small whites, peeled, about the size of a large marble. Frozen pearl onions work; they will not brown as evenly, so let them dry off in the butter before adding flour.
- YieldThree steaks of three-quarters of a pound each is a generous four servings, or three in the manner of the period. Serve with boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
À la batelière — "boatwoman's style" — is one of the classic French fish garnishes codified in the nineteenth century, and is generally taken to mean small glazed onions, mushroom heads, crayfish and small fried eggs in a red-wine sauce, though such garnish lists were never wholly fixed. It belongs to the family of freshwater fish stews, the matelotes, that took their character from cooking fish in wine rather than water: bargemen's and fishermen's food, the name deriving from matelot, sailor, and long predating its codification in the restaurant kitchens of Paris. What is telling about this version is that it applies the treatment to salmon and swaps in shrimps and tomato juice, which may suggest an American kitchen writing after the spread of commercial canned tomato, though that is inference rather than proof. The book's habit of pairing a red-wine sauce with fish would have struck some contemporary readers as a novelty; the old rule of white wine with fish was already a convention by 1900, and dishes like this one are the standing exception to it.