Clean the fish. Cut into large slices; salt well and sprinkle with black pepper and let stew with sliced onion, some celery and parsley. Add a few slices of lemon; let cook fifteen minutes to the pound; then mix 1 tablespoonful of flour with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add to the fish. Let cook five minutes more and serve hot or cold.
A plain braise of firm fish in its own juices with onion, celery, parsley and lemon, thickened at the end with a butter-flour paste. The original assumes you know that "let stew" means covered, over low heat, with just enough liquid to keep things moving.
- The missing liquidNo liquid is specified; add water, fish stock or a dry white wine to come about a third of the way up the slices. Salted fish will also release some of its own moisture once covered.
- Fifteen minutes to the pound is too longFifteen minutes to the pound is long by modern standards and will overcook thinner cuts. Judge by the fish instead: slices 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick are done in roughly 8 to 12 minutes, when the flesh just parts from the bone.
- Choose the right fish"Large slices" suggests cross-cut steaks from a large fish - cod, hake, salmon or carp, carp being a common German choice; halibut steaks work too. Thin fillets will collapse; if that is what you have, reduce the time to a few minutes and lift the pieces out to make the sauce.
- Salt well, then waitSalting the slices and letting them stand 15 to 20 minutes before cooking firms the flesh and can help it hold together in the pot, though the recipe itself specifies no waiting time.
- The butter and flourOne tablespoon flour to two of butter is a soft beurre manie, mashed together cold and dropped into the simmering liquid in small pieces. Whisk it in off the boil, then let it cook the stated five minutes so the raw flour taste goes; do not tip in dry flour.
- Lemon slicesYou may want to lift the lemon out before serving; peel left in the pot can turn bitter, and slices are unwelcome on the plate.
- Serving coldThe recipe's cold option works because the cooking liquid, rich in gelatin from bones and skin, sets to a light jelly around the fish. Chill it in the cooking liquid rather than draining it.
- YieldNo quantity is given; about 2 lb of fish would serve four.
Stewed fish of this kind was a Central European weekday staple, sustained by the church calendar and by the freshwater fish - carp, pike, tench - kept alive in tanks and ponds far from any coast. The lemon and the butter-flour thickening mark it as a bourgeois nineteenth-century treatment rather than a peasant one: the sharp-and-buttery axis runs through much German fish cookery of the period, and the same method with vinegar in place of lemon becomes the familiar blue carp and jellied fish dishes. What the page itself shows is a day-a-date, country-by-country format, in which a national label is attached to a dish for the home cook, usually reduced to a single characteristic seasoning or technique.