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Salmon Trout, Maitre D'Hotel
Procure three three-quarter-pound slices fresh salmon trout. Mix on plate a tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, repeatedly turn fish in seasoning, then place on broiler and broil for six minutes on each side. Dress on hot dish, decorate with a little parsley greens, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over them and serve.
A three-line restaurant recipe that assumes you know how to make maitre d'hotel butter and how to handle a gridiron. Both are worth spelling out.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe recipe never gives it. Cream 4 tablespoons softened butter with 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 to 2 teaspoons lemon juice, salt and a little white pepper; chill it firm and put a slice on each hot portion so it melts at the table. Made ahead and rolled in parchment, it keeps a week in the refrigerator.
- "Broiler" means the grillIn a kitchen of this period this is a hinged wire gridiron over live coals, cooked on both sides. An overhead oven broiler works, but you will need to turn the fish, and a well-oiled grate or a fish basket saves the skin from tearing.
- What salmon trout isThe name covered sea trout in Europe and, in American markets, large lake trout or what we now sell as steelhead. Any of those work; farmed steelhead or a thick salmon steak is the closest supermarket substitute.
- Slices, not filletsThree-quarter-pound cross-cut steaks, bone in, which at that weight will run a good inch or more thick. That thickness is what makes twelve minutes reasonable; a half-inch fillet would be dry in half the time.
- Cook to temperatureSix minutes a side suits a thick steak over hot coals, but heat from live fire varies. Judge by an instant-read thermometer or by the flesh just parting at the backbone rather than by the clock.
- The oil-and-seasoning plateTurning the fish repeatedly in oil, salt and pepper on a plate is a dry marinade and a release coating in one. Do it just before cooking; salt sitting on fish for half an hour draws out moisture and firms the surface.
- YieldThree steaks of that size serve three generously, or six as a first course if you split them off the bone after cooking.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose books carried the plain telegraphic style of a professional kitchen where the reader was assumed to know the standard preparations by name. Maitre d'hotel butter is one of those: a compound butter of parsley and lemon, generally said to be named for the head of the dining room rather than any cook, and by the late nineteenth century the default finish for grilled fish and steaks across French-influenced menus. "Salmon trout" was a market name rather than a species, applied to any large pink-fleshed trout. The whole treatment is deliberately bare, on the principle that a good fish grilled over coals wants seasoning, heat and butter and nothing else.