Baked Halibut
Take a piece of halibut weighing six or seven pounds, and lay it in salt water for two hours, wipe dry and score the outer skin. Set in the baking pan in quite a hot oven, and bake an hour, basting often with butter and water heated together in a tin cup. When a fork will penetrate it easily it is done. It should be a fine brown. Take the gravy in the dripping pan-add a little boiling water, should there not be enough-stir in a tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, piece of a lemon, and thicken with browned flour previously wet with cold water. Boil up once and put into sauce boat.
A plain roast of a large cut of fish with a pan gravy. The one thing to change is the timing: an hour will leave halibut dry and cottony.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockHalibut is very lean and firms up fast. Even a thick six-pound piece is done at roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness, and it should come out of the oven at 130-135F at the thickest point, where the flesh is just barely opaque and beginning to flake. The book's "fork will penetrate it easily" is already past that stage.
- "Quite a hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. That is hot enough to give the browning the recipe asks for without an hour of exposure.
- The salt-water soakTwo hours in salt water is a brine, and brining does help lean fish hold moisture. A 5 percent solution (about 1 3/4 oz salt per quart of water) for 30-45 minutes gives much the same benefit without oversalting a piece this size. Dry thoroughly before it goes in the pan, or it will steam rather than brown.
- Basting liquidButter and water heated together in a tin cup makes a loose emulsion; the water keeps the butter from scorching. Kept warm at the side of the stove, it works the same way now, and the recipe's own instruction to slake the browned flour in cold water applies to the gravy that follows.
- Browned flourFlour toasted in a dry pan until nut-coloured, once a pantry staple. It thickens less than raw flour for the same volume, so allow about half again as much, and slake it with cold water as directed before it goes into the hot pan juices.
- Which halibutAtlantic halibut is severely depleted and generally advised against; Pacific halibut is the sustainable choice. A whole 6-7 lb centre cut is a special order at most counters, and a 3 lb piece behaves the same way with proportionally less time.
- YieldSix to seven pounds of halibut on the bone serves ten to twelve as a main course. The gravy as written makes about a cup.
Halibut baked in a single large piece is often said to have been a company dish in late nineteenth-century America, when the New England fishery landed the fish in sizes that made a roast possible; a hundred-pound halibut was unremarkable, and a centre cut could be treated much like a joint of meat, scored, basted and served with a pan gravy. The Worcestershire sauce and browned flour in the gravy place the recipe squarely in its period: bottled Worcestershire had been widely available in America since the middle of the century and was the standard shortcut to a savoury brown sauce, while browned flour was kept ready-made in the pantry. The language throughout, the tin cup and the dripping pan, suggests a coal range where the cook was in the room with the food the whole hour.