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Salmon Trout, Hollandaise
Procure six slices fresh salmon trout half inch thick and place in a frying pan with half ounce butter, one gill white wine, a teaspoon salt, one gill water and one tablespoon vinegar. Cover the fish with a sheet of lightly buttered paper, boil for two minutes on the fire, then set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, dress the fish on a hot dish, one piece overlapping another. Reduce the gravy on the fire to half gill, then pour in a hot Colbert sauce, mix well with a wooden spoon, pour over the fish and serve.
A shallow-braised fish in the classic French manner, with one immediate puzzle: the title promises hollandaise and the text finishes with Colbert. Sort that out before you start.
- Hollandaise or ColbertThe heading and the method disagree. Colbert sauce is meat glaze mounted with butter, sharpened with lemon and parsley or tarragon, and it will take the reduced braising liquid without breaking. Hollandaise will not: pouring hot pan juices into it and beating with a wooden spoon over heat is a good way to split it. If you want the hollandaise of the title, spoon it over the plated fish and leave the reduction out of it.
- GillA quarter pint: 4 fl oz (half a cup) by American measure, 5 fl oz by imperial. So half a cup each of white wine and water at the lower figure, with the reduction half that, a quarter cup.
- Oven heatNone is specified. Moderate, 350F, suits the dish; the liquid should barely tremble rather than boil.
- Twenty minutes is too longHalf-inch slices of trout are cooked through in six to eight minutes at 350F once they have had their two minutes on the stove. Twenty minutes will give you dry, chalky fish. Pull it when the flesh is just opaque at the centre and beginning to separate into flakes.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to sit directly on the fish, buttered side down. It keeps the exposed top surface from drying and traps enough steam to cook the upper half. Foil works but seals more tightly and can stew the fish.
- Salmon troutIn a European kitchen this meant sea trout. American markets sold char and lake trout under the same name. Any firm, pink-fleshed trout or a small salmon fillet cut into portions will behave the same way.
- The panA frying pan that will go from burner to oven, wide enough to hold six slices in a single layer without crowding. Enamelled or stainless is the safer choice: the vinegar and wine will react with unlined aluminium, and with bare cast iron or plain steel, and can leave a metallic taint.
- YieldSix portions, served overlapped down a warmed platter as the original directs. Boiled potatoes and cucumber were common accompaniments to fish of the period, though this recipe names none.
Cooking fish under buttered paper in a little wine and water, then reducing the liquor into the sauce, is the classic French braisage of fish scaled down for a domestic range, and it lies behind a great many hotel fish courses of the period. Sauce Colbert, generally traced to the nineteenth-century French repertoire and named for the seventeenth-century minister, is essentially a maitre d'hotel butter enriched with meat glaze, which is why it can absorb the pan reduction where a hollandaise cannot. How the mismatch between this recipe's title and its text arose is not recoverable; such slips are not uncommon in the big turn-of-the-century compendia. "Salmon trout" itself was an elastic market name: in Britain it meant sea trout, while American fishmongers applied it to lake trout and char, so the cook was expected to buy what was good that morning.