Steelhead Trout with Leek-Tomato-Basil Cream Sauce

Apart from smoked salmon, which I can no more resist than I can stand on my head, I’ve been keeping away from fish in the family Salmonidae for years. Can I believe the label claiming that the tempting king salmon on ice was wild-caught? Can I trust the environmental and animal-welfare bona fides of this or that fish farm thousands of miles away — and will its farmed fish taste good in any case? That’s too much data to process when all I want is a fish dinner. It’s much more satisfactory to buy whatever local species are in season, which in my corner of New York City are many and varied.

Still and all, the mildly fatty softness of salmon and its kin gives great pleasure, and Jackie and I hanker after it from time to time. Now, a trustworthy food writer I know in the Twitter dimension has been buying steelhead trout (a variant of rainbow trout and a card-carrying Salmonid) farm-raised in the Hudson Valley under conditions she finds reassuring, and I bought a beautiful — and beautifully butchered — fillet at the Union Square farmers market a while ago. I’d hoped to buy some sorrel too, but there was none by the time we got down there. Those tart leaves would have been wilted into a light cream sauce, as in The World’s Best Salmon Dish: Escalope de saumon à l’oseille, devised in the 1960s by the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros for their restaurant in Roanne, about 60 miles northwest of Lyon.