Cut a white fish into pieces and salt well; let stand. Then cut 1 onion and 1 clove of garlic in thin slices; fry in 1 tablespoonful of butter. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown. Then fill the pan with water and let boil. Add 1 teaspoonful of celery seed, 1 bay-leaf, a few cloves, a pinch of thyme and mace, ½ teaspoonful of paprica and salt to taste. Let boil. Add the fish to the sauce; sprinkle with black pepper and ginger and let cook until done. Remove the fish to a platter. Beat the yolks of 2 eggs with a little water and stir in the sauce with some chopped parsley. Let get very hot and pour over the fish. Garnish with lemon slices and sprigs of parsley.
A brothy fish stew thickened twice — first with a brown roux, then with egg yolks at the end. The second thickening is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the beaten yolks go in, the sauce must never boil. "Let get very hot" means bring it to no more than about 175F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon. Temper the yolks first with a ladle of the hot broth, off the heat, before returning them to the pan.
- "Fill the pan with water"Genuinely vague. For 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour, 2 to 2½ cups of liquid gives a light sauce that will reduce as the fish poaches. Fish stock or half stock, half water improves it considerably.
- Salting the fishThis is a dry brine. Fifteen to thirty minutes for fillets is enough to firm the flesh; leave it an hour and the fish turns hammy. Pat it dry before it goes into the sauce, and go easy on the "salt to taste" in the broth to compensate.
- Which white fishAnything firm enough to hold together in liquid — cod, haddock, hake, halibut, pike, or perch. Cut into 2-inch pieces, skin on if you like, roughly 1½ to 2 lb.
- Cooking time for the fish"Until done" is a matter of minutes at a bare simmer — roughly five to ten for 2-inch pieces, depending on thickness — not the long stew the phrasing suggests. The fish is ready when it flakes at the thickest point; it will carry on cooking on the platter.
- Browning the rouxCook the flour in the butter with the onion and garlic until it smells nutty and turns the colour of weak tea. Stop short of dark brown — a scorched roux will make the whole dish bitter and it cannot be corrected.
- PaprikaAt the time this book was written this meant sweet Hungarian paprika, not the smoked Spanish kind now common on supermarket shelves. Smoked pimentón will dominate everything else in the pot.
- Mace and gingerMace is the outer sheath of nutmeg — a pinch of grated nutmeg substitutes acceptably. The ginger is dried ground ginger, sprinkled over the fish, not fresh root.
- YieldServes four as a main course with boiled potatoes or dark bread to catch the sauce. Serve it hot; the egg-thickened broth breaks on reheating.
The heavy hand with cloves, mace, bay and ginger reflects an older European style of fish cookery in which imported spices, rather than herbs or citrus, did the work of masking the flavour of river fish — a taste that had largely faded from Western cookbooks by 1900 but persisted further east. The book's format is one dish a day for a year, each from a different national tradition, with dated pages and German dishes on either side. What arrives under the label "Russian" here is therefore a compression: a plausible dish, considerably simplified.