Cook a large fish with 1 onion, 2 stalks of celery, parsley, a tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper until done. Remove fish to a platter. Add 2 chopped pickles, the juice and rind of a lemon, ½ cup of vinegar. Mash the yolks of 2 boiled eggs with 1 raw egg, a teaspoonful of prepared mustard and a tablespoonful of butter. Add to the sauce and boil. Lay the fish in the boiling sauce ten minutes; then serve.
A terse period recipe that assumes you already know how to poach a fish. Two things need attention: the liquid, which is never specified, and the egg-thickened sauce, which the text tells you to boil.
- The missing liquidAs written the fish cooks with an onion, celery, parsley and a tablespoon of butter and no water at all. Read it as a shallow poach: enough lightly salted water or fish stock to come halfway up the fish, the vegetables and butter added to it. The recipe specifies only "a large fish," so a whole fish or thick fillets.
- Do not boil the egg sauceThis is the hinge. One whole raw egg plus two hard yolks and butter will curdle into grains if it actually boils. Reduce the poaching liquid with the pickles, lemon and vinegar first, then whisk the egg mixture in off the heat and hold it just below a simmer until it thickens.
- The second cookingTen minutes back in the sauce will overcook fish that was already "done." Either pull the fish a few minutes early and let the finish happen in the sauce, or simply spoon the finished sauce over the platter and skip the return trip.
- "Prepared mustard"Here this most likely means a smooth, mild bottled mustard rather than Dijon or a coarse grain. Dijon works but is sharper; use a scant teaspoon if you substitute.
- PicklesTake these as sour cucumber pickles rather than sweet gherkins. Sweet pickle plus half a cup of vinegar plus lemon makes an unbalanced sauce.
- Lemon rindGrate or pare it thinly, avoiding the white pith, and add it to the reduction rather than the finished sauce so the oils have time to come out.
- Acid levelHalf a cup of vinegar with a whole lemon is aggressive by modern taste. Start with a quarter cup and adjust after the sauce is thickened; the butter and egg soften it but only so far.
- YieldA large whole fish of this kind will serve four to six. Serve warm, with boiled potatoes.
The sauce here — vinegar, pickle, lemon, mustard, hard-boiled yolks bound with butter and a raw yolk — belongs to a family of cold-climate northern European fish sauces that use acid and preserved cucumber where a French kitchen would use a fish fumet and cream. The recipe's place in the book says as much as the dish does: collections like this one, popular in the United States in the early twentieth century, gave a household one dish per day and labelled each with a country, offering a tour of "all nations" from a single American pantry. The nationality is often a loose gesture rather than a documented regional recipe, and "Dutch" in these books frequently covers German cooking as well, by way of the old confusion with Deutsch.