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Salmon, Hollandaise
Place three slices fresh salmon, three-quarters of a pound each, in a frying pan with half ounce butter, half gill white wine, one gill water, the juice of quarter lemon, two branches parsley, one teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on the range for five minutes, then set to bake in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, dress the slices on a hot dish with a folded napkin, remove spinal bones and decorate with a little parsley greens. Prepare a Hollandaise sauce, add two tablespoons fish liquor to it, mix well, pour into a sauce bowl, and send to the table separately.
A shallow-poach-then-bake treatment for thick salmon steaks, finished with hollandaise served apart. The one number to ignore is the oven time.
- The 25 minutesThree-quarter-pound salmon steaks are cooked through in roughly 8 to 12 minutes in a moderate oven after the initial simmer. Twenty-five minutes reflects a period taste for firm, flaking, fully set fish; pull the salmon at 120-125F at the centre for a moist result, 130F if you want it opaque throughout.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to set the dish in the oven. Around 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 4 tablespoons and one gill of water is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons of white pepper roughly half a teaspoon.
- The buttered paperIn effect a cartouche: a piece of parchment, buttered on the side that faces the fish, laid directly on it. It keeps the exposed surface from drying while letting steam escape more readily than a tight-fitting lid would.
- Pan choiceThe "frying pan" must go from range to oven, so use a heavy skillet or sauté pan with an ovenproof handle, wide enough to hold the three slices in one layer without crowding.
- The fish liquorThe two tablespoons of pan liquid added to the hollandaise are the point of the dish, not a garnish. Strain it, and if it tastes thin from the added water, reduce it briefly before folding it in; adding it warm rather than hot keeps the sauce from breaking.
- Hollandaise timingMake the sauce while the salmon is in the oven and hold it barely warm, off direct heat, in a bowl over water no hotter than the hand can stand. Hollandaise will not wait long and will not reheat.
- ServingThe folded napkin on the platter was standard in formal service, and absorbs draining liquid; you can skip it. The recipe gives no yield, but three steaks of this size will divide comfortably into about six portions, each half-steak lifted off the bone once the spinal bones are removed at the platter.
The fish is cooked in a little wine and water under paper, boned at the platter, and the sauce sent separately in its own bowl rather than poured over. Hollandaise, whose name is generally traced to the Dutch reputation for butter, had by then settled into the form still used — egg yolks, acid and warm butter — and was the standard partner for poached salmon on both sides of the Atlantic. The salmon itself would have been a spring and summer luxury, sold in thick cross-cut slices from a very large fish, which is why the recipe speaks of three-quarter-pound "slices" rather than the modest portioned steaks a fish counter cuts today.