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Bluefish À La Creole
Remove bones from a fresh, three-pound bluefish. Place on a well-buttered fish sheet, laid in a dripping pan. Sprinkle with salt and paprika. Cook in a hot oven twenty-five minutes, basting often with melted butter or sweet dripping. Remove to hot serving platter and pour a Creole Sauce around fish. Sprinkle fish with buttered crumbs, set platter on a board and place in oven to brown crumbs. Garnish with slices of lemon dipped in chopped parsley.
A straightforward baked fish with a sauce poured around rather than over it, from an era when the platter itself went back into the oven. Two things need attention: the oven timing and the freshness of the fish.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this means roughly 400-450F. The recipe depends on high heat and frequent basting to keep an oily fish from drying while the surface takes colour.
- Twenty-five minutes is too longTwenty-five minutes may be longer than needed -- a boned three-pound bluefish is not thick, and at this heat it can be done in under twenty minutes. Cooks aiming for a moist result pull it around 130-135F at the thickest point, though the usual food-safety recommendation for fish is 145F. Check it early rather than assuming the full twenty-five minutes.
- Fish sheetA perforated or solid metal sheet that sat in the dripping pan so the whole fish could be lifted out intact. A sheet of heavy foil or parchment with overhanging edges, or a flat rack, does the same job.
- Sweet drippingFresh, unsalted rendered fat -- "sweet" here means not rancid and not salted, the opposite of the crock of accumulated bacon grease. Clarified butter is the easiest modern stand-in.
- Buy it the day you cook itBluefish is high in oil and its flesh turns strong and metallic within a day or two. This recipe specifies "fresh" for a reason. If it smells assertive at the counter, choose something else.
- Creole SauceThe recipe assumes a sauce given elsewhere in the book. Creole sauces of this period are generally tomato-based with onion and pepper and some heat. Have it hot and fairly thick before the fish comes out, since it is poured around the fish and must not flood the crumbs.
- Browning the crumbsThe platter goes back into the oven only long enough to colour the topping -- two or three minutes, or a short pass under the broiler. The board underneath insulates the serving dish; a heavy platter on a folded towel or a sheet pan achieves the same thing. Do not use a platter that has not been oven-tested.
- YieldA three-pound whole fish serves four generously as a main course.
Bluefish was a cheap, abundant Atlantic coast fish in the early twentieth century, landed in quantity from New England to the Carolinas and sold fresh because its oil content made it a poor keeper -- one reason it travelled inland less readily than leaner fish. The "a la Creole" tag, meaning a tomato-and-pepper sauce built on the New Orleans model, was applied liberally in American cookbooks of this period to almost any baked or broiled protein, and here it does real work -- the acidity and heat of the tomato sauce cut the richness of an oily fish in a way that plain butter cannot.