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Salmon, Coblenz
Procure three three-quarter-pound salmon steaks and keep on a plate till required. Cut a small carrot and a small onion in exceedingly small pieces, then mix in a sautoir a level tablespoon butter, two level tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for half minute, moisten with a gill white wine and two gills white broth, add the carrot and onion, mix well, let boil for ten minutes and add the salmon. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, lightly mix, cover the pan, boil for five minutes, then set in oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, dress the salmon on a hot dish, pour contents of pan over salmon, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A Rhine-style braised salmon in a light white-wine velouté. The method is sound; the timing belongs to an era that liked its fish cooked through and then some.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes of boiling plus thirty-five in the oven will reduce salmon steaks to dry flakes in a puddle of sauce. Build and simmer the sauce for its ten minutes, then add the fish and give it roughly 8-12 minutes in the oven for three-quarter-pound steaks, until the centre is just set and still coral.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal. A moderate oven, 350F, suits a covered braise of this kind.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So a half cup of white wine and one cup of white broth (a light veal or chicken stock, or fish stock).
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper. With a teaspoon of salt against a cup and a half of liquid, this is aggressive by modern taste; season lightly and correct at the end.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan with a lid, deep enough to hold the steaks in one layer and go into the oven. Any oven-safe braising pan works.
- The rouxButter and flour heated only half a minute stay pale, which is the intention: this is a blond roux for a white sauce. Add the wine and broth off the heat or in stages to keep it smooth, and cut the carrot and onion genuinely fine so they soften in ten minutes.
- CroutonsHeart-shaped croutons are white bread cut with a cutter and fried in clarified butter until golden. Fry them last so they stay crisp, and set them around the dish rather than in the sauce.
- YieldJust over two pounds of fish on the bone: four generous servings, six modest ones. Steaks of that size are large by current retail standards; two 1-lb steaks or four smaller ones will do.
Dishes named for a city in this period usually signal a garnish or a treatment rather than any documented local original, and Coblenz points at the Rhine: Koblenz sits where the Moselle meets the Rhine, and both rivers were serious salmon fisheries until industrialisation and damming collapsed the runs in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The pairing of that salmon with a dry white wine from the Moselle valley is a plausible inference behind the name rather than anything the recipe states, since it specifies only "white wine", and the light flour-thickened sauce with finely cut carrot and onion is standard French professional practice of the day rather than anything German. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its foreign dishes work exactly this way, taking a place name as a cue for one or two defining ingredients and rendering the rest in the classical kitchen idiom he had trained in. The heart-shaped croutons and the sprinkle of chopped parsley are that idiom's signature finish, appearing around many unrelated dishes in the same book.