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Halibut Sandwich No. 2
Shred boneless cold boiled halibut and rub smooth with a wooden spoon; season with salt and pepper and one tablespoonful of lemon juice; add three tablespoonfuls of thick cream and toss up. Spread this mixture on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, with a crisp lettuce leaf, that has been dipped in mayonnaise dressing, between. Cut triangular.
A cold-fish spread of the kind that assumed a household had poached halibut left from the previous day's dinner. It comes together in minutes once the fish is cooked and chilled.
- Start with the fish"Cold boiled halibut" means fish gently poached in salted water or court bouillon and left to cool, not boiled hard. The recipe gives no quantity of fish; it is scaled to three tablespoons of cream and one of lemon juice.
- Rub smoothThe wooden spoon and the shredding are doing the work of a food processor, but the texture wanted is a coarse paste with some flake left in it, not a purée. A fork against the side of a bowl gets closer to the original than a machine will.
- Thick creamIn 1909 this meant cream skimmed thick from the top of the milk, roughly what heavy cream is now. Three tablespoons is enough to bind; add it gradually, since halibut varies in how dry it cooks.
- Season harder than you thinkCold poached halibut is bland and cream mutes it further. Taste after mixing and correct the salt and lemon at that point, not before.
- The lettuceDipping the leaf in mayonnaise rather than spreading mayonnaise on the bread keeps the crumb from going damp. It works, and it is the one detail worth copying exactly.
- Bread and cuttingThin-sliced white bread, lightly buttered as the recipe directs. Cutting on the diagonal into triangles was common in tea and luncheon service of the period.
- Keep it coldA creamed cooked-fish filling should be assembled shortly before serving and held refrigerated; it does not sit well at room temperature for more than an hour or two.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection appeared in 1909, at a point when the sandwich had moved decisively out of the tavern and into the tea table, the luncheon and the picnic hamper — hence the fussy triangles and the thin white bread of the era. Fish sandwiches of this sort existed largely to use up cooked fish, and halibut was a standard poaching fish for family dinners. The pattern here — flake, mash, bind with cream, sharpen with lemon — is the same one applied across the era to salmon, lobster and chicken, and it survives essentially unchanged in the tinned-salmon and tuna spreads of later decades. The "No. 2" is simply Fuller's way of numbering variants, differing by little more than the binder.