Clean and split a fish open down the back; remove the backbone; sprinkle with salt and pepper; put in a baking-dish, flesh side up. Put flakes of butter on top; sprinkle with a little flour; moisten with cream. Bake in a hot oven until brown. Pour over a Hollandaise sauce and serve hot.
A terse turn-of-the-century entry that assumes you can bone a round fish and make Hollandaise without being told. The quantities are left entirely to the cook, so work by the size of the fish.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425–450F. At that heat a butterflied fish of ordinary size browns and cooks through in roughly 12–18 minutes; go by thickness, not the clock.
- Which fishThe method suits a round fish split and boned — trout, small bluefish, mackerel, whiting, branzino. A flat fish or a thin fillet will overcook before the top colours.
- Splitting down the backCut along either side of the spine from the head end, free the backbone and snip it out with shears, leaving the belly skin intact so the fish opens flat. A fishmonger will do this if asked for a butterflied or kited fish.
- Cream, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. Enough to film the bottom of the dish and moisten the flour is the intent — about 1/4 cup for a 1 to 1 1/2 lb fish. More than that stews the fish rather than roasting it.
- The flourThe dusting of flour is what binds the butter and cream into a thin glaze and gives the browned surface. Sprinkle it lightly and evenly; a heavy hand makes a pasty crust.
- DonenessThe flesh should be opaque and just parting at the thickest point. Cooks aiming for a moist result often pull the fish at around 130-135F, though standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F. Fish held longer in a hot oven dries quickly, and the sauce will not rescue it.
- HollandaiseHave the sauce made and held warm (not hot) before the fish goes in, since it cannot wait and neither can the fish. A blender or immersion-blender emulsion is stable enough for the few minutes needed.
- YieldOne butterflied fish of about 1 1/2 lb serves two; scale up by cooking two or three side by side in a wide dish rather than crowding one pan.
The "of all nations" cookbooks of the early twentieth century worked by attaching a national label to a simple method, and this entry is a fair example: what presumably marked it as Dutch to the compiler was the butter, the cream and the plain baking, cooking traits long associated with the Low Countries and their dairy trade. Baking a split fish flesh-side up with butter and a dusting of flour is a broadly North Sea approach, applied to the herring, mackerel and whiting that came off Dutch boats in quantity. The Hollandaise poured over at the end may well owe more to period American and English fashion than to Dutch home cooking. The name simply means "Dutch sauce," and it was often said to have been named for a Netherlandish style of butter-and-egg dressing, though it belongs firmly to the French repertoire. Pairing the sauce with a dish labelled Dutch was, for a compiler filling 365 slots, a tidy piece of logic.