Season a fish with salt, pepper, some grated green ginger and curry-powder. Place in a baking-pan with 1 sliced onion, 2 chopped green peppers and 1 sprig of parsley. Pour over some water and hot melted butter; sprinkle with flour and bake until done. Garnish with sliced lemon and parsley.
A terse turn-of-the-century sketch rather than a worked recipe: no quantities, no oven temperature, no fish named. The bones are sound, but the cook supplies most of the detail.
- The fishThe recipe names none and gives no size. A whole round fish of about 2-3 lb, scaled and gutted, or a thick fillet section, suits the method. A firm white fish holds up best to the liquid and flour; delicate flat fish will fall apart under the sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Baked fish of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350-375F, until the flesh at the thickest point flakes and reads 145F -- roughly 20-30 minutes for a 2-3 lb whole fish, less for fillets.
- Green gingerThis is fresh root ginger, not the dried ground spice and not preserved stem ginger in syrup. A tablespoon of it, grated, is about right for a fish this size.
- Curry-powderCommercial curry powder of the period was generally mild and turmeric-heavy. Use a teaspoon or two of a standard blend, and bloom it briefly in the melted butter rather than dusting it on raw -- it tastes noticeably less dusty that way.
- Green peppersIn American cookbooks of this period "green peppers" generally means sweet bell peppers. If you want the heat an Indian kitchen would have had, one or two green chillies alongside the sweet pepper is closer to the mark.
- "Some water" and the flourThe water and butter should come no more than a third of the way up the fish, or you are poaching rather than baking. The flour sprinkled over the top thickens that liquid into a thin pan sauce as it cooks; a tablespoon is plenty, and it wants to go on last so it sits on the surface.
- BastingWith so little fat the exposed top dries out. Spoon the pan liquid over the fish once or twice during baking.
- YieldA 2-3 lb fish prepared this way serves three or four; rice is a natural accompaniment, though the original says nothing about it.
This belongs to a genre popular around 1900: the day-a-dish calendar cookbook, which promised a housewife a year of variety by tagging each recipe with a nationality. The "Indian" label points to the British Raj rather than to any Tamil household -- curry powder itself was a British export commodity, a fixed blend sold in tins to approximate the freshly ground masalas that South Indian cooks made to suit each dish. What survives of an actual coastal Indian fish preparation here is the fresh ginger and onion, and the habit of baking or steaming a whole fish under a wet spiced coating. What has been added is the butter, the flour thickening and the lemon-and-parsley garnish, all thoroughly Anglo-American. The recipe is best read as evidence of how an American kitchen of the period imagined India: one spice tin, one gesture toward fresh ginger, and a familiar baked fish underneath.