Season and slice red fish; roll in flour and fry until brown. Then heat 1 tablespoonful of butter; add 1 chopped onion and 1 cup of tomatoes; let fry; add 1 tablespoonful of flour and 1 cup of water; also some parsley, salt, pepper and 1 bay-leaf chopped fine. Let all cook; then add the slices of fried fish. Let all get very hot and serve with boiled rice.
A one-pan fish dish in the Spanish-Creole manner: fry the fish, build a quick tomato sauce in the same style, and reunite them for a minute at the end. The whole thing takes under half an hour.
- The hinge: reheat, do not re-cookThe fish is already cooked through from frying. Returning it to the sauce is only to warm it and let it take up flavour — two or three minutes, spooning sauce over, no more. Longer and the slices break up and dry out.
- "Red fish"Most likely red drum (redfish), common along the Gulf Coast, though the term was used loosely in the period and could cover other reddish fish such as snapper. Any firm white fish holds up in the same way — red snapper, drum, striped bass, grouper, or thick cod fillets.
- SlicesProbably cross-cut steaks about an inch thick, bone in, a common way of portioning a whole large fish. Fillets of similar thickness work identically; reduce the frying time slightly.
- "Season and roll in flour"Salt and pepper the fish, then dredge just before it goes into the pan. Flour applied early draws out moisture and turns to paste. Fry in enough fat to come partway up the fish, about 3-4 minutes a side over medium-high heat.
- 1 cup of tomatoesIn books of this period this often means canned tomatoes, juice included, though fresh stewed tomatoes were also meant. A cup of canned crushed or chopped tomatoes with their liquid is the direct equivalent; two medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped, if they are in season.
- The bay leafChopping a dried bay leaf fine leaves hard splinters in the sauce. Dropping it in whole and lifting it out before serving gives a better texture, at the cost of a slightly milder flavour.
- The sauceSoftening the onion in butter, stirring in the flour, then adding the liquid is a small roux — it should simmer 5 to 10 minutes to lose the raw-flour taste and thicken to a coating consistency. A cup of water gives a thin gravy; fish stock is better if you have it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of fish and no yield; the sauce as written is enough for roughly two to three portions, with about a cup of cooked rice per person. Scale the sauce up in proportion if you fry more fish.
This comes from a genre popular in the period: the perpetual calendar cookbook, giving one dish for each day of the year, here with each assigned a nationality. The label "Spanish" in American books of the period was elastic, covering almost anything built on onion, tomato and sweet or hot pepper, and it often reached the reader by way of the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean rather than Spain itself — the combination of red fish, tomato sauce and boiled rice is closer to New Orleans and Havana kitchens than to Madrid. Frying fish first and then finishing it in a sauce is an old and sensible economy: the flour coating that browns the fish also helps bind the sauce, and the same pan does both jobs. Redfish in particular was cheap and abundant along the Gulf in this era, long before the blackened-redfish boom of the 1980s put such pressure on the stocks that commercial fishing for it was curtailed.