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Salmon Trout, Richelieu
Procure three three-quarter pound slices salmon trout, place them in a sauteuse with half gill white wine, gill water, tablespoon vinegar, one branch parsley, half ounce butter, light teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover the fish with a buttered paper, set in the oven for fifteen minutes, then bring it to the oven door. Add twenty-four small, freshly opened oysters around the salmon, reset in the oven for ten minutes, remove and dress the fish on a hot dish one overlapping another. Prepare a Hollandaise sauce, drain the oysters, add them to the Hollandaise sauce with six small slices truffle and six sliced, canned mushrooms, pour a tablespoon of fresh liquor in the sauce, mix well, pour the sauce over the fish and serve.
A hotel-style baked fish with a fortified hollandaise. The recipe assumes a professional larder and a cook standing at the oven door, and two of its instructions need rethinking before you start.
- The oystersTen minutes in the oven will shrink them to erasers. Poach them separately in their own liquor for about a minute, until the edges just ruffle, then drain and fold them into the sauce. Bake the fish for the full time on its own instead.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Use a moderate oven, around 350F, and judge by the fish: the slices are done when the flesh flakes at the bone.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup and a gill of water is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them make 3/4 teaspoon pepper -- assertive but not a misprint.
- Sauteuse and buttered paperA sauteuse is a shallow, straight-to-sloping-sided pan that goes from burner to oven; any ovenproof skillet works. The buttered paper is a cartouche laid directly on the fish to keep it moist, not a lid.
- Salmon troutAt this period the term meant sea trout or a large lake trout, sold in thick cross-cut slices. Steelhead, arctic char, or ordinary salmon steaks of the same thickness behave the same way in the pan.
- The truffle and mushroomsCanned mushrooms were a common hotel convenience and gave a soft, neutral slice; small button mushrooms sweated in butter are better. Fresh truffle is optional at the price; a few slices of preserved truffle or a drop of truffle juice in the sauce reads the same.
- Fresh liquor in the sauceThe tablespoon of oyster liquor is what turns plain hollandaise into this dish. Add it at the end, off the heat, and keep the sauce warm rather than hot or it will break -- a warm water bath, not a burner.
- The pan juicesThe wine, water, and vinegar left in the sauteuse are seasoned fish stock. Strain and reduce them to a spoonful and add that to the hollandaise along with the oyster liquor rather than pouring it away.
- YieldThree steaks of 12 ounces each serve three generously or six at a formal meal, where each steak is halved. Serve on a warmed platter; hollandaise chills fast on cold china.
"Richelieu" is one of the fixed garnish names of classical French cooking, and its origin is unsettled: it is variously said to honor the cardinal or the eighteenth-century duc and marshal, a matter of folk tradition rather than documented fact. Classical usage attaches the name to more than one treatment. The combination of hollandaise, truffle, oysters, and mushrooms is a good index of turn-of-the-century American hotel dining, when oysters were still cheap enough to scatter two dozen around a single platter of fish and canned mushrooms were a mark of a well-stocked pantry rather than a compromise. This book gives measurements in gills and saltspoons and no oven temperature at all -- the reader was assumed to know a moderate oven by hand.