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Salmon, Normande
Have three slices fine, fresh salmon, one inch in thickness. Marinade them exactly the same as bass. Then place the salmon pieces in a lightly buttered pan, and proceed to cook them precisely the same as the bass. Dress on a hot dish and pour the Normande sauce over. Decorate the dish with bread croutons, and serve.
A cross-reference recipe: nearly all the technique lives in the bass entry elsewhere in the book, and the sauce in the sauce chapter. Two things are worth settling before you start — how the fish is actually cooked, and what Normande sauce is.
- The missing instructionsThe method here is borrowed wholesale from the book's bass entry: the marinade and the cooking are both simply referred back to it, and the only detail this page supplies is a lightly buttered pan. Since the original text is not reproduced on this page, read the bass recipe before committing the salmon rather than guessing at the marinade or the liquid.
- Oven heatDoneness -- Whatever heat the bass entry specifies, inch-thick salmon steaks or fillets cook quickly: check them early and pull them at 125-130F at the thickest point, when the flesh still gives slightly and the flakes have only just begun to separate.
- Don't cook it to the old standardDon't overcook it -- Salmon, farmed or wild, turns dry and chalky past about 135F, and white albumin curd pushes out through the surface. Err on the short side of whatever time the bass recipe gives.
- Normande sauceA fish velouté enriched with mushroom and oyster liquor, finished with egg yolks, cream and butter. It is a liaison sauce: once the yolks and cream go in it must not boil, or it will break and turn grainy. Hold it warm off direct heat and add the butter last.
- Oyster liquorClassical Normande depends on the strained liquor from poached oysters and mushroom cooking liquid. If oysters are not to hand, a well-reduced fish fumet with mushroom trimmings gives the nearest thing; a plain cream sauce is not the same sauce.
- CroûtonsCroutons -- Not the salad cubes. In garnishing of this kind croutons are usually shapes of crustless white bread fried in butter until pale gold, set around the edge of the platter to catch sauce.
- YieldThree inch-thick slices serve three, or two generously. Sauce the fish lightly; too much swamps it.
Anything called à la normande points to Normandy and, in the kitchen, to its dairy and its shellfish: cream, butter, oysters, mussels, sometimes cider or Calvados. The sauce as codified in nineteenth-century French practice is a fish velouté bound with egg yolks and cream and sharpened with oyster and mushroom liquor, and it was regarded as one of the more demanding derivatives precisely because the liaison will curdle if it is let boil. Its appearance here is typical of the period: American cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned hard on the French repertoire for anything meant to look formal at table, and salmon under a rich white sauce was standard company fare. The terse cross-reference — marinate and cook it exactly as the bass — is also of its time.