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Boiled Fish (With Onion and Garlic)
Put a piece of oiled paper in the bottom of a fish pan; on it place a large fish that has been cleaned and skinned.
Add a sliced onion, two cloves of garlic and sufficient salted water to cover. Boil until done. Take it up and squeeze over it the juice of a lemon. Boil two eggs hard, chop the whites fine and sift the yolks. Cut cold boiled beets in fancy shapes. Put a row of the chopped whites of eggs down the middle of the fish, on each side of that a row of the yolks and next the yolks a row of the beets. Over all pour a French dressing of oil and vinegar and a drop of mayonnaise on each piece of beet. Garnish the dish with leaves from the heart of a lettuce.
This is a cold dressed fish, not a hot supper dish: the poaching is only the first quarter of the work, and everything after the lemon juice is done once the fish has cooled. Plan for the fish to sit at least an hour before you decorate it.
- Never actually boil itA rolling boil will shred a whole fish and squeeze it dry. Bring the water to a boil, slide the fish in, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles at around 180F. Reckon roughly 8 to 10 minutes per inch measured at the thickest point, or until the flesh at the backbone reaches 145F.
- The oiled paperParchment does the job, and a doubled sling of it under the fish lets you lift a 4 lb salmon or bass out in one piece. A fish pan is a long lidded poacher with a perforated rack; a roasting pan set across two burners works if the fish fits.
- Salted waterNo quantity is given. About 1 tablespoon of salt per quart is enough to season without curing, and the onion and garlic should go in with the cold water so they have time to give something up.
- Skinned before cookingThe instruction is unusual, and probably tied to the decoration, which needs a clean pale surface. Skinning raw is fiddly; poaching skin-on and peeling the skin away while the fish is still warm gives a neater result and holds the shape better.
- Hard eggsTwelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks without the grey ring. Sifting the yolks means pushing them through a fine sieve to a fluffy powder, which is what makes the stripe read as a stripe.
- French dressingIn this period that means a plain vinaigrette, three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked and poured over. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Dress at the last minuteBeets bleed. Cut and dress them separately, and set them on the fish only just before it goes to the table or the pink will run into the egg white.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb whole fish so presented serves six to eight as a cold main course, and it is meant to be carried to the table whole and portioned there.
Cold poached whole fish, striped and banded with chopped egg and beet, was one of the standard buffet centrepieces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it belongs to the same impulse as the aspic moulds and moulded salads that fill these books: food arranged to be looked at before it is eaten. The technique descends from professional garde-manger work, where sieved yolk, chopped white and beetroot supplied colour and pattern. What is slightly unusual here is the garlic in the poaching liquid, which points away from the plain court-bouillon of the English tradition; onion, by contrast, is standard in a court-bouillon.