Fish: Normandy
Fillets of Flounder à la Normandy.
Prepare the fillets and lay in a buttered baking pan, season with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, moisten with brown stock, adding a teaspoonful lemon juice; lay the fillets on serving dish, and pour over them Normandy sauce, garnish with slices of lemon.
Baked Haddock.
Stuff with a dressing, baste the fish with butter, put a cupful water into the pan, and bake in a moderate oven one hour, basting often; just before taking up, sprinkle a tablespoonful cracker crumbs over the fish and let it remain in the oven long enough to brown delicately. Put the fish on a warm platter, add water and thickening to the gravy, serve in a gravy tureen, garnish with parsley and sliced lemon.
Fish Timbales.
Put the uncooked fish through the meat chopper. Boil together, until you have a smooth paste, the milk and bread crumbs. When cold, add it gradually to the fish and press through a sieve; add the cream, salt, and pepper, and fold in carefully the well - beaten whites of the eggs.
Three fish preparations run together in one entry, in the compressed style of a book that assumed you already knew the outline. Two are workable; the third is a fragment.
- The timbale recipe is incompleteIt names milk, bread crumbs, cream, salt, pepper and egg whites but gives no quantities, and it stops before the cooking. Timbales of this type are packed into buttered moulds, covered, and poached in a water bath in a moderate oven until just set. As printed, treat it as a method sketch rather than a recipe you can follow.
- Normandy sauceSauce normande is a fish velouté — fish stock thickened with a blond roux — enriched with cream and egg yolks and sharpened with lemon, classically with mushroom and oyster liquor stirred in. The book expects you to have one on hand; nothing in this entry tells you to make it.
- Brown stock with white fishMoistening flounder with brown stock is period practice and will taste heavier than modern palates expect. Fish stock or a light chicken stock suits the fillets better, and the Normandy sauce that follows is built on fish stock anyway.
- Oven heat"A moderate oven," the term used for the haddock, is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350F, though period usage varied. The flounder fillets are given no oven heat and no time at all: thin fillets in a buttered pan need roughly 10 to 15 minutes, until the flesh is opaque and flakes.
- An hour on the haddockOne hour at a moderate heat implies a whole stuffed fish of some size, on the order of four or five pounds. Cook to 145F at the thickest point beside the backbone; a smaller fish will be done well short of the hour, and the frequent basting is what keeps it from drying out.
- Cracker crumbsCracker crumbs in this period were generally made from plain soda or water crackers, closer to an unsalted saltine than to anything sweet. Dry breadcrumbs are the nearest substitute.
- Thickening the gravy"Water and thickening" means the pan juices let down with water and bound with a flour-and-butter paste or a flour-and-water slurry, whisked in and simmered a minute or two to lose the raw taste.
- YieldThe baked haddock serves four to six depending on the fish; allow six to eight ounces of fillet per person for the flounder.
Naming a dish à la Normandy is often said to have served as shorthand for the cream, butter, cider-country richness associated with the French coast, and in classical kitchen usage sauce normande belongs specifically to sole and other flatfish — the great fish sauce of the Channel ports, thickened with yolks and cream and traditionally carrying mushroom and oyster liquor. That a general American household manual could print the name with no recipe for the sauce says a good deal about the period: French sauce vocabulary had filtered far enough down into middle-class domestic cooking that a compiler assumed the reader either owned a sauce chapter or a French cookery book. Haddock, meanwhile, is the plain counterweight — a cheap North Atlantic groundfish that stuffed and baked whole made a Sunday dinner, and the cracker-crumb finish is thoroughly American, a use for the barrel crackers many households kept.