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Salmon Trout, Francaise
Place three slices fresh salmon trout, three quarters of a pound each, in a frying pan. Season with a teaspoon salt, adding a half ounce butter, a half gill red wine and one and a half gills demi-glace. Boil for five minutes, then add six small, freshly opened oysters, six canned mushrooms and six shrimps. Mix a little. Cover the fish with a little buttered paper, place in the oven for twenty minutes, remove, dress the slices of fish, one overlapping another, boil the sauce for five minutes, pour it over the fish and serve.
A French-service fish course written for a cook who already has demi-glace on hand and a pan that goes from burner to oven. The main adjustment is timing: as written the fish and the shellfish are all overcooked.
- Gills into cupsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of red wine is 1/4 cup; one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup. A half ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Salmon troutThe name covers large sea-run trout and char rather than a distinct species. Steelhead, arctic char or a firm salmon cut into 3/4 lb cross-cut steaks all behave the same way here.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown sauce built on veal or beef stock and espagnole. Commercial concentrates work; a well-reduced brown stock thickened lightly is closer to what Filippini meant than a jarred gravy.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which was normal. A moderate oven, 350F, matches the covered braise this describes.
- The timing to changeTwenty minutes in the oven after five minutes at a boil will take 3/4 lb steaks well past done. Pull the fish at 125-130F internal, usually 8-12 minutes covered at 350F.
- Add the shellfish lateOysters and shrimp cooked through both the boil and the oven stage turn rubbery. Slip them into the sauce during the last two minutes, off the heat if the sauce is near boiling.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without sealing the pan the way foil does.
- Canned mushroomsCanned button mushrooms come already cooked and carry the flavour of their packing liquid. Fresh buttons sauteed in butter first give a better result; drain canned ones well if you use them.
- Vessel and yieldThe frying pan goes into the oven, so use cast iron or another ovenproof saute pan. Three steaks serve three as a main course, or six as the fish course of a longer menu.
The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's tradition in New York, and this dish is restaurant French of that moment: a fish steak braised in a brown sauce and finished with a garnish of oysters, mushrooms and shrimp. Pairing demi-glace, a meat-stock sauce, with fish reads oddly now, but brown-sauce treatments of fish were part of the grand-kitchen repertoire of the period, alongside the fish-stock sauces. The shellfish trio is a shorthand garnish of the same school, close to what French kitchens labelled normande or joinville depending on the house. "Salmon trout" corresponds to the French truite saumonée, a large trout with pink flesh rather than any single species, and menus of the period used it loosely for whatever handsome trout the fishmonger had. The buttered paper laid over the fish, the five-minute reduction of the sauce at the end, and the overlapping arrangement of the slices on the platter all point to a cook working to plate a course quickly for service.