Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [85]
It does occur to me that since halibut has a tendency to dryness and loses all its spirit if overcooked, the arrival of gas cookers and their controllable heat must have made it much easier to serve up properly done fish. I remember as a child that we had both a kitchen range and a new gas cooker, and this suddenly made finicky cooking much easier.
Our halibut in Britain comes mainly from the great sandy seabed between Norway and Scotland. There is also an immense fishery off the Pacific coast of Canada and the United States, both of the Pacific halibut and the more common California halibut. All three have a similar sweetly mild and close flesh, though the California halibut is not quite as good as the Pacific kind. Nowadays, of course, the fishing is organized in a starkly efficient manner. In the last century, though, the Red Indians would go out by the hundred in their canoes, 19 km (12 miles) offshore, and catch these immense creatures with their hooks of Douglas pine or yew, and lines of dried seaweed and deer sinew. When the fish bit on the trailing lines, they would pull them in and spear them, and drag them into the canoes. In a high sea, inflated seal skins, turned inside-out and painted, were fixed to each side of the canoes to keep them buoyant with their heavy loads.
Alan Davidson in his North Atlantic Seafood reproduces a small engraving from the end of the last century that shows a rather similar style. Two men in a dory that sits low on the water are ‘hauling the trawl, gaffing and clubbing the halibut’. In the background is a similar dory and the halibut schooner to which they will take back their load. He also gives a recipe for an Icelandic halibut soup, thickened with a little flour and butter, sharpened with vinegar and lemon, and enlivened with prunes or rhubarb. Which reminds me to say that grilled halibut tastes splendid with butter flavoured with orange or lime juice.
HOW TO CHOOSE AND PREPARE HALIBUT
Properly fresh halibut – frozen is decidedly second best, though passable – has a look of bright juicy whiteness. Steaks vary enormously in size according to the halibut: the biggest I have seen weighed about 1 kg (2 lb) and was nearly 2½ cm (1 inch) thick, a giant slice cut right across. If one ever had the chance of buying from one of the rare enormous halibut one reads about, I cannot quite imagine how large across it would be. In any case, recipes are easy enough to adapt, as it is the thickness of any piece of fish that dictates cooking time, not its weight or surface area.
In California, they sometimes sell halibut in long fillet strips known as flitches, cut parallel to the backbone. This seems to have been a Victorian practice in England since there were special flitching knives made for cutting halibut. They are featured in the 1884 supplement to Knight’s Practical Dictionary of Mechanics, but not in the original publication of 1874–77. This fact, plus the sudden increase in halibut recipes in books of the 1880s, date the rise of its coming into favour. Perhaps the practice still continues somewhere.
Another Californian delicacy is halibut cheeks: I have never eaten them, but they are said to be good. Something I can believe, as the little nuggets known as knobs and cheeks