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Salmon, Sauce Fleurette
Procure three slices fresh salmon, three-quarters of a pound each; place in a frying pan with half ounce butter, one gill white wine, a branch parsley, juice of quarter of a sound lemon, half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover salmon with buttered paper, then set in oven thirty minutes. Remove, dress fish on a dish, prepare a sauce Fleurette, reduce the fish liquor to half the quantity on fire, strain into sauce, lightly mix, pour over the fish and serve.
A plainly written braise that assumes two things the modern cook has to supply: an oven temperature and a working knowledge of sauce Fleurette. Both are below.
- The sauce comes firstSauce Fleurette is not made here — the recipe expects you to know it. The name points to crème fleurette, thin unwhipped cream, and a sauce of that name in this period appears to have been a light cream sauce; the book itself gives no clue here. Have it finished and warm before the fish leaves the oven, since it is only mixed with the strained cooking liquor and poured over.
- Cut thirty minutes downThree-quarter-pound salmon steaks are done at 125-130F at the centre, which in a covered pan takes roughly 12-18 minutes at 350F. Half an hour will drive the albumin out in white curds and leave the flesh dry and flaking apart.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat this as a moderate oven, 350F. The fish is meant to poach gently in its own liquor and wine, not roast.
- A gillHalf a cup of white wine — enough to film the pan, not submerge the fish.
- Buttered paperA round of buttered parchment cut to the pan and laid directly on the fish. It traps steam and keeps the exposed surface from drying, which matters more than a lid because it sits against the flesh.
- Use an ovenproof panA "frying pan" in a professional kitchen of this date would generally have been heavy iron or copper, and would go from stove to oven without complaint. Anything with a plastic or bonded handle will not.
- Half a teaspoon of pepperThat is a lot of visible black specks in a pale cream sauce. White pepper, and rather less than the full measure, suits the dish better.
- Reducing the liquorStrain out the parsley and any solids, reduce by half to concentrate the wine and fish flavour, then fold it into the sauce off the heat. Boiling a cream sauce hard after the acidic reduction goes in risks splitting it.
- YieldThree steaks of that size serve three generously, or four if divided.
The name points straight at the sauce: crème fleurette is a French term for thin, unwhipped cream, and a sauce Fleurette in turn-of-the-century professional kitchens meant a pale, cream-finished sauce for fish or vegetables. This recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (1906), written by a chef and manager at Delmonico's in New York, and its telegraphic style is characteristic of the whole volume — quantities, then a chain of instructions, with the assumption that the reader can turn to another page for the sauce. That shorthand is itself period evidence: books of this kind were written for cooks trained in a French repertoire, where the standard sauces were memorized rather than looked up. Salmon prepared this way is braised in wine under buttered paper and sauced with cream.