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Salmon Trout, Au Bleu
Procure three slices, three-quarters of an inch thick, of fresh salmon trout; place in a frying pan with half ounce good butter, half gill claret and one gill cold water. Season with a teaspoon salt and one saltspoon paprika, adding half a sliced onion and two branches parsley. Cover the fish with a sheet of buttered paper and place in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, take off the paper, dress the fish on a hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate the dish with six pieces of lemon and parsley greens and serve with a Hollandaise sauce in a bowl separately.
A simple oven-braise in claret and water, finished with hollandaise on the side. The one thing to change is the timing.
- Thirty minutes is far too longThirty minutes is likely too long -- slices three-quarters of an inch thick will usually be done in roughly 12 to 15 minutes in a moderate oven, once the flakes just separate. Cooks who prefer the fish only just set often pull it at 125-130F at the centre, though the usual food-safety advice for fish is 145F. Half an hour tends to leave trout dry, and hollandaise will not disguise it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the original. 350F works.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of claret is 1/4 cup and one gill of water is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. The full teaspoon of salt is generous for three portions; scale it to the weight of fish.
- ClaretAny dry red Bordeaux-style wine works. It is there for acidity and a faint colour in the pan juices rather than for tannin, so nothing heavy or oaky.
- Salmon troutThe name covered large lake trout and sea-run brown trout, sold pink-fleshed and cut into steaks. Steelhead, arctic char or a thick-cut trout fillet all behave the same way.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the size of the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without sealing the pan, which is what a lid would do. Foil is a poorer substitute because it traps more steam.
- Pan choice"Frying pan" here means an ovenproof skillet or shallow braising pan. It must be metal or enamelled cast iron, not a nonstick pan with a plastic handle.
- The napkinThe folded napkin under the fish is period service: it absorbs the liquid that drains off so the platter does not flood. Reducing the pan juices for a minute and spooning them around works better for a modern table.
- YieldThree slices, three servings. Allow about a cup of hollandaise, made and held warm off the heat while the fish bakes.
Au bleu in strict French usage describes a fish killed at the last moment and slipped straight into a boiling vinegar court-bouillon, where the natural slime on the skin sets to a bluish sheen: the classic treatment for trout in a restaurant with a live tank. Here, though, the term attaches to something quite different, a wine-and-water braise under buttered paper served with hollandaise. The looser usage may have already been under way in American kitchens of the period, though this one recipe is thin evidence for it. That drift tells you something about the period's cookbooks, which borrowed the vocabulary of the grand French kitchen and applied it to dishes a household cook could actually manage without a fish tank. "Salmon trout" is the same kind of borrowing: a market name for any large pink-fleshed trout rather than a species, and one that flattered the fish by association with salmon.