Clean and season a large white fish with salt and paprica and let boil with 4 sliced shallots and 1 clove of garlic mashed fine. When nearly done, add 1 tablespoonful of butter, 2 sprigs of parsley chopped fine, 1 tablespoonful of soy, 1 tablespoonful each of tarragon and Worcestershire sauce. Let cook until done. Place on a platter. Garnish with fried parsley and serve with boiled rice.
A short, loosely written braise that assumes the cook knows how much liquid to add and how long fish takes. The instructions omit both, so the notes below fill in what the original leaves to judgment.
- The missing liquidThe recipe says to boil the fish but never says in what. Use just enough water or light fish stock to come halfway up the fish in a wide pan, cover, and simmer; the sauce ingredients added later are meant to season a small amount of reduced cooking liquid, not a stockpot.
- Do not actually boilA rolling boil will break a whole white fish apart and squeeze out its moisture. Hold the liquid at a bare shiver, around 180F, and count on 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness. "Nearly done" means the flesh is still slightly translucent at the bone.
- Tarragon"1 tablespoonful each of tarragon and Worcestershire sauce" almost certainly means tarragon vinegar, a standard bottled item in 1900s kitchens and the only form of tarragon that pairs sensibly with a spoonful of Worcestershire. A tablespoon of dried tarragon leaf would overwhelm the dish.
- Soy"Soy" here is soy sauce, sold in period American groceries as a bottled table sauce. A Japanese-style shoyu suits the dish; note that between the soy and the Worcestershire the fish is already well salted, so go light with the salt at the start.
- PapricaSimply paprika. Period paprika was mild and sweet rather than the smoked Spanish styles common now; use sweet Hungarian if you want the intended effect.
- ShallotsFour sliced shallots and a mashed garlic clove go into the poaching liquid from the beginning, so they soften and flavor the broth rather than remaining as a garnish. Strain them out before saucing if you want a clean platter.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat, about 350F, for a few seconds until they stop sputtering and turn brittle-crisp, then drained. The parsley must be bone dry or the fat will spit violently.
- YieldA "large white fish" of 3-4 lb serves four to six with the rice. Cod, haddock, striped bass or snapper all work; the recipe wants a firm, lean fish that holds together in liquid.
This is a good example of the way American compendium cookbooks around 1900 assigned nationalities: the dish is called Japanese on the strength of a single tablespoon of soy sauce and a bowl of boiled rice, while the shallots, garlic, butter, parsley and Worcestershire belong squarely to Anglo-French hotel cookery. Bottled soy had been imported into Britain and the United States since the eighteenth century, long before most Western cooks had any contact with Japanese food, and it appears to have been treated much like Worcestershire and mushroom ketchup, as one more brown table sauce rather than the base of another cuisine. The format of this book - a year of dinners each stamped with a country - reflects a taste for the exotic also visible in the period's magazine writing on foreign travel; the recipes themselves rarely strayed far from the American kitchen they were written in.