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Salmon, Verdoyant
Place three slices of fresh salmon of three-quarters of a pound each in a frying pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; pour in half gill white wine and one gill water, add half ounce butter, cover with a buttered paper, boil for five minutes, then set in oven to bake for twenty-five minutes. Removed, dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, and keep warm.
Place in a mortar two branches fresh parsley, one branch chervil one branch watercress and one shallot, and pound to a paste; then add half ounce butter, thoroughly mix together, and press through a sieve into a bowl. Prepare a Hollandaise Sauce; gradually add to the Hollandaise all the green butter, continually mixing until thoroughly amalgamated. Pour the sauce over the salmon and serve.
A poached-then-baked salmon under Hollandaise enriched with pounded green herbs. The method is sound; the cooking time belongs to an era that liked its fish firm all the way through.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes at a boil plus twenty-five in the oven will take three-quarter-pound salmon steaks well past dry. Cook to an internal 125-130F at the thickest point, which for steaks of that size is roughly 10-14 minutes total, and let carryover heat finish them while you build the sauce.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and one gill of water is 1/2 cup - just enough shallow liquid to steam rather than submerge the fish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term, so any figure is a modern guess; a moderate oven of around 350F is a reasonable choice. The pan goes in still covered, so the fish steams under its paper.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the side facing the fish. It holds steam against the surface and keeps the salmon from drying or coloring. Foil works but presses more heat down.
- Green butterA mortar gives a smoother paste than a food processor, which tends to bruise rather than crush herbs. Either way the sieving step matters - it removes stalk fibre, and unsieved parsley stems will leave stringy threads in the finished sauce.
- Chervil and watercressChervil is seasonal and often absent from supermarkets; tarragon in a smaller quantity is the usual stand-in, though it is more assertive. Watercress can be replaced with arugula. Use a small shallot.
- Folding in the herb butterAdd the green butter to the Hollandaise off the heat and well below a simmer. Hollandaise breaks above about 180F, and the cold butter paste going in fast will also chill and split it. Work in small additions.
- YieldThree steaks of three-quarters of a pound each, bone in, will serve three generously or six as a first course. Divide the sauce accordingly - a full Hollandaise is more than three portions need.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York as steward and manager as much as chef, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with the French repertoire as it was actually cooked in American hotel kitchens, dish names and all. Verdoyant simply means verdant or greening, and the technique here - herbs and a shallot pounded to a paste with butter, sieved, then beaten into a warm emulsion - is the same maneuver behind sauce verte and beurre de Montpellier, which classical French cookery used to bring color and a raw herbal note to poached fish. The combination of parsley, chervil and watercress is close to the standard French green-herb grouping; chervil in particular was a kitchen-garden staple then and has largely dropped out of English-speaking cooking since. Salmon poached in wine and water under buttered paper, then dressed in overlapping slices, is said to have been a familiar way of presenting a fish course in hotel dining rooms of the period.