Home › Fish › For Sauce (Lemon egg cupful melted Crisco)
For Sauce (Lemon egg cupful melted Crisco)
1/2 lemon 1 egg 1/2 cupful melted Crisco 1 yolk of egg 1/2 teaspoonful mustard 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 pinch red pepper 1 tablespoonful vinegar 2 chopped gherkins For fish. Wash dry and trim flounder. On one side make cut down center from near head to near tail and raise flesh from the bones. Make a stuffing with Crisco, parsley, breadcrumbs, herbs, shrimps, lemon juice, seasonings, and nearly all the egg, and insert under the fillets of the flounder, leaving the center open. Dot with Crisco. Brush fish over with remaining egg, sprinkle with browned breadcrumbs, put on Criscoed baking tin, and bake thirty minutes. Serve with sauce.
For sauce. Put egg yolk into a bowl, and, with a wooden spoon stir a little; then add by degrees melted Crisco, stirring constantly; then add seasonings, vinegar, gherkins and parsley.
Fish Pudding (Kate B. Vaughn)
Two recipes run together here: a stuffed baked flounder and the cold egg-and-oil sauce served with it. The ingredient list at the top belongs to the sauce; the stuffing quantities are left entirely to the cook.
- Melted Crisco is the problemThis sauce is a mayonnaise, and mayonnaise made with melted shortening sets hard and pasty the moment it cools, coating the palate with fat. Use a neutral liquid oil at room temperature instead, and expect roughly the same proportion: 1/2 cup oil to one yolk.
- What Crisco wasHydrogenated cottonseed shortening, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Where the fish recipe calls for it as a solid — in the stuffing, dotted on top, greasing the tin — butter does the job better.
- Adding the oilBy degrees means drop by drop for the first tablespoon or two, then in a thin stream. Rushing it splits the emulsion; a fresh yolk in a clean bowl will bring a broken sauce back if beaten into it slowly.
- Raw yolkThe sauce is never cooked. If serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or shell eggs pasteurized in the shell.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and the recipe names no oven heat at all. Around 350–375F will suit a stuffed flatfish for thirty minutes. Test at the thickest point: the flesh should be opaque and lift cleanly from the bone, about 145F.
- Boning the flounderThe cut down the centre of one side (conventionally the dark side), with the fillets eased back from the frame, is the classic pocket for stuffing a flatfish. The recipe does not call for removing the backbone; left in, it holds the shape and lifts out at the table.
- Stuffing amountsNone are given. For a 1.5–2 lb flounder, about a cup of fresh breadcrumbs, 2 oz chopped cooked shrimp, a handful of parsley, a squeeze of lemon and enough beaten egg to bind will fill the pocket without bursting it. Reserve a little egg for brushing.
- GherkinsSmall sour pickled cucumbers, not the sweet gherkins sold in American supermarkets. Cornichons are the closest match; the sauce is essentially a tartare.
- YieldOne flounder of this size serves two; the sauce makes about two-thirds of a cup, enough for four.
Crisco arrived in 1911 and Procter & Gamble promoted it as food manufacturers still promote new products: by commissioning cookbooks in which the ingredient runs through the recipes, savory and sweet alike. That is why shortening turns up here in the stuffing, on the baking tin, and — against all sense — melted into a cold mayonnaise. The dish underneath the branding is an ordinary Anglo-American baked stuffed flounder with tartare sauce; gherkins, mustard and vinegar beaten into an egg-and-oil emulsion was a familiar nineteenth-century accompaniment to fried or baked white fish. Read the sauce as a period document and the substitution is obvious: replace the shortening with oil and you have a sauce that works perfectly well now.