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Salmon, Bien
Place three three-quarter-pound slices salmon in a sautoire with an ounce butter, half gill white wine, juice of a quarter lemon, a branch parsley, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover fish with a buttered paper, boil for five minutes and set in oven for twenty minutes, remove and take up paper. Carefully dress salmon, place on a hot dish, decorate with a little parsley greens, and serve with a Hollandaise-Bien sauce separately.
A straightforward braise of salmon steaks in butter and wine, written for a cook who already knows the house style. Two things need translating: the vessel and the cooking time.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan with a lid, deeper than a frying pan and wider than a saucepan. Any lidded skillet or wide sauté pan that holds three steaks in one layer will do; the fish should not be crowded or stacked.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter pint: 2 fluid ounces by American measure, about a quarter cup of white wine (by imperial measure a gill is 5 fluid ounces, so nearer 2 1/2). With an ounce of butter and the lemon that is all the liquid the pan gets, so a heavy pan matters. Note that the recipe covers the fish with buttered paper and never calls for a lid.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the diameter of the pan, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It traps steam against the surface and keeps the top from drying while the pan is uncovered in the oven. Parchment, not foil, and buttered so it lifts away without taking skin with it.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this; the pan is only finishing what the five minutes on the stove began.
- The timing is the problemThree-quarter-pound salmon slices are substantial steaks, and how thick they run depends on the size of the fish. Five minutes at a boil plus twenty in the oven will take them well past opaque and into dry and flaking. Modern practice is to cook to an internal temperature of 125-130F at the thickest point (official guidance for fish is 145F); for steaks this size that is usually somewhere around eight to twelve minutes in the oven after the initial simmer.
- "Dress" the salmonPeriod usage for arranging, not for sauce. Lift each steak whole with a wide spatula, slip out the centre bone and the skin if you like, and set them on the hot platter without breaking them.
- The sauceHollandaise-Bien is not a standard classical sauce; the name points to a variation defined elsewhere in the book itself. A plain hollandaise, sharpened with lemon and loosened with a spoonful of the strained pan liquor, will stand in. Send it separately in a warm boat, as directed, so it does not slacken on the platter.
- YieldThree steaks, three servings, though at three-quarters of a pound apiece these are generous; halved steaks will feed six alongside potatoes.
Salmon dressed in a little wine and butter under a paper, then sauced with hollandaise, is a hotel dish through and through: it can be assembled in a pan, held briefly, and plated to order with the sauce sent apart. Recipes carrying a personal tag like "Bien" typically commemorate a chef, a patron or a house, since a name on a dish was how a kitchen signed its work. The technique itself is older and simpler than the name suggests: braising fish under buttered paper with a splash of wine is standard French practice, and hollandaise was the near-automatic partner to poached or braised salmon in English and American dining rooms alike.