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Salmon, Valois
Place three slices fresh salmon of three-quarters of a pound each in a frying pan, add a half ounce butter, half gill white wine, a gill demi-glace, two branches parsley, half teaspoon salt and saltspoon cayenne. Cover fish with lightly buttered paper, then boil on range five minutes. Set in oven twenty-five minutes. Remove, lift up fish with skimmer, place on a hot dish; boil sauce for five minutes. Lightly roll six freshly opened oysters (if at hand) in flour and plunge in boiling fat three minutes, take them up, drain on a cloth, sprinkle a little salt over, arrange around fish, as well as half a small bunch fresh fried parsley. Strain sauce over fish and serve.
A braise disguised as a fry-pan dish: the salmon cooks gently under buttered paper in a little wine and brown sauce, then gets a garnish of fried oysters and parsley. The timings are the part that needs attention.
- The measurementsA gill is half a cup, so the demi-glace is 1/2 cup and the white wine 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, and cayenne at that quantity is assertive.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book offers no oven term to interpret. For a covered braise a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. The pan must be ovenproof, handle included.
- Cut the fish time hardTwenty-five minutes in the oven on top of five minutes on the range will take three-quarter-pound salmon steaks well past dry. Modern practice pulls salmon at 125-130F at the thickest point, which for steaks this size means roughly 10-15 minutes total under the paper. Check early rather than trusting the clock.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered side down on the fish. It holds steam against the surface and keeps the top from drying while the sauce reduces below.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock, which few home kitchens keep on hand. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate works; a reduced fish fumet enriched with butter is the lighter route, though it moves the dish away from Filippini's intent.
- The oystersThree minutes in boiling fat is too long for six shucked oysters. Flour-dusted oysters in 375F fat are done in 60-90 seconds, as soon as the coating sets and colours. Beyond that they shrink and toughen.
- Fried parsleyThe parsley must be bone dry before it goes near hot fat, and it wants only a few seconds. Wet sprigs will throw fat out of the pan. Use a spider or slotted spoon and a lid within reach.
- YieldJust over two pounds of salmon serves four to six generously; three steaks plated whole makes three portions, which is presumably how it was sent out.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a man who had spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and it reads like a professional's shorthand rather than a home cook's instruction. The name points to the French repertoire: sauce Valois is generally given as a béarnaise finished with melted meat glaze, better known under its other name, Foyot; the link to the Valois royal house is often repeated but is not documented. What appears here is not that sauce but a demi-glace braising liquid, which suggests Filippini was using "Valois" loosely to signal the meat-glaze character of the dish -- brown sauce on fish, in a period when demi-glace was the backbone of restaurant cooking. The fried oysters "if at hand" are the American note: on the Atlantic seaboard in 1906 oysters were cheap and plentiful enough to scatter round a plate as garnish.