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Salmon, Provencale
Place three slices fresh salmon, three-quarters of a pound each, in a frying pan. Season with half teaspoon salt and saltspoon paprika. Pour in half gill white wine and two gills demi-glace; boil for five minutes, then add twelve anchovies in oil, cut into small pieces, and three peeled and well-cleaned fresh mushrooms cut into very thin slices. Cover the fish with a sheet of lightly buttered paper. Set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress the salmon on a hot dish. Remove the spinal bones, pour the sauce over, sprinkle half teaspoon of chopped chives over and serve.
A Delmonico-style brown-sauce preparation written for a cook who already had demi-glace on the stove. The measurements are easy to convert; the cooking time is the part that needs rethinking.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and two gills of demi-glace is 1 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only to set it in the oven. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes at a boil plus twenty minutes in the oven will take thick salmon steaks well past dry. Cook to 125-130F at the thickest point, which for 1 1/2-inch steaks is roughly 10 to 12 minutes in the sauce; the residual heat while you plate finishes the job.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock, thickened and glossy. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; a light chicken or veal stock reduced by half with a spoonful of tomato paste is a reasonable stand-in. Water or thin broth will not give the body the dish depends on.
- SaltTwelve anchovy fillets and a cup of demi-glace carry a great deal of salt already. Add the half teaspoon at the end, if at all, after tasting the finished sauce.
- The buttered paperEffectively a cartouche: paper cut to the pan, buttered side down, resting directly on the fish. It keeps the exposed surface from drying while the dish bakes. Foil will serve at a pinch, though it seals more tightly than paper.
- MushroomsThree whole mushrooms sliced very thin is a garnish, not a filling. Ordinary white or cremini are correct; the peeling the recipe calls for is optional with modern cultivated mushrooms.
- Boning and yield"Spinal bones" means the central vertebra in each steak, easily lifted out once cooked. Three steaks of 3/4 pound each, about 2 1/4 pounds total, serves three generously or four modestly.
In the classical French naming that ran through American hotel kitchens at the turn of the century, provençale most often signalled tomato, garlic and olive oil. This version builds instead on anchovy and mushroom in a brown sauce, leaning on the anchovy-forward cooking associated with the Mediterranean coast rather than on a tomato garnish. The recipe's assumptions place it firmly in the professional kitchen: a cook who is told to pour in two gills of demi-glace is a cook with a stockpot already going, and the instruction to dress the fish on a hot dish and bone it at the last moment is service work, not home cooking. Salmon was cut in three-quarter-pound slices across the fish, in a period when it was sold whole and broken down in-house rather than arriving as trimmed fillet.