Clean and season a large fish with salt and pepper and let cook with 1 cup of vinegar, 1 large onion, 2 sprigs of parsley and 2 of thyme, 1 tablespoonful of butter, ½ cup of raisins, a few cloves, 1 lemon sliced and 1 teaspoonful of prepared mustard. Let cook until done. Remove the fish; add 2 large pickles chopped and ¼ cup of sugar, and thicken with the yolks of 2 eggs well beaten. Serve hot or cold, garnished with parsley.
A sweet-and-sour poached fish in the Central European Jewish manner, written with the terseness of a cook who assumed you already knew the method. Two things are left unsaid: how much liquid, and how to handle the egg yolks.
- The missing waterA cup of vinegar will not poach a large fish. Assume water to nearly cover, with the vinegar as the souring agent — roughly a quart of water to the cup of vinegar. Undiluted, the result is inedibly sharp.
- The hinge: the yolksBeaten yolks stirred into a boiling pan curdle into threads. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot liquid, return them, and warm without letting the sauce bubble again.
- What fish"A large fish" in this tradition is most often carp, pike or whitefish — firm, gelatinous, sweet. A whole fish of around 3-4 lb, or thick cross-cut steaks, works; delicate flat fish will collapse in the acidic liquid.
- "Until done"Thick steaks of carp or whitefish need 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer, a whole fish somewhat longer. It is done when the flesh parts from the bone at the thickest point; hard boiling shreds it.
- Prepared mustardMeans a plain yellow or brown table mustard, not Dijon or a grainy specialty blend. A teaspoon is a background note, not a flavour you should be able to name.
- Pickles"Two large pickles" means brined dill cucumbers, not sweet gherkins — the sugar comes separately, from the quarter cup added at the end. Sweet pickles will push the sauce over.
- Serving coldCarp and pike are rich in gelatin, so a fish chilled in its own liquor can set into a light jelly. The recipe allows either hot or cold; if serving cold, make it a day ahead and refrigerate the fish in the sauce.
- YieldA fish of around 3-4 lb should serve about six as a main course, eight or more as a cold first course.
Sweet-and-sour poached fish of this kind is one instance of what English and American cookbooks of the period simply labelled "Jewish fish" — a dish in which raisins, sugar, vinegar and lemon defined a whole family of holiday cookery. Fish was the traditional Sabbath dish, and because it could be cooked on Friday and eaten cold on Saturday without any further work, cold jellied and sour fish became a fixture of the Sabbath table; the gelatin in carp and pike does the setting unaided. The raisin-and-sugar sweetening is often traced to Polish Jewish taste specifically, distinguishing it from the plainer sour versions found further west, and it is the same sweet-savoury instinct that shows up in Polish-style gefilte fish. Its appearance in a book of national dishes reflects the era's habit of treating Jewish cooking as a cuisine of its own alongside French, English and Italian — one recognisable dish standing in for the whole.