Fish: Sauce
Place in a hot oven, add a cupful boiling water, and cover. Baste frequently. Bake one hour. Serve with Sauce Hollandaise.
Baked Fresh Cod with Cheese Sauce.
Lay a slice of cod in salt and water for half an hour; wipe dry and rub with melted butter and lemon juice. In the bottom of the baking pan, under the grating and not touching the fish, have a cupful veal stock. Pepper and salt the fish, cover and bake ten minutes to the pound.
Take up on a hot platter and sift fine crumbs over it. Put dots of butter on these. Set in the oven to brown while you strain the gravy from the pan, thicken with browned flour, add the juice of lemon, 4 tablespoonfuls grated Parmesan cheese, and a little onion juice. Boil one minute, pour a few spoonfuls carefully over the crumb crust of the fish, the rest into a boat.-MARION HARLAND.
Baked Bluefish.
This recipe will answer for all sorts of fish. Have the fish opened at the gills, and the intestines drawn out through the opening. Make a stuffing of pint bread crumbs, a tablespoonful melted butter, a teaspoonful salt, and a dash pepper. Mix the ingredients, fill the fish, and sew the head down firmly. If you use pork, cut the fish into gashes two inches apart and all the way across on one side down to the bone; fill the gashes with larding pork, dust the fish thickly with bread crumbs, baste it with a little melted butter, put½ cupful water in the pan, and bake in a quick oven about an hour, basting frequently. Dish the fish carefully, garnish with parsley and lemon, and serve with brown or tomato sauce.- MRS. RORER.
Bluefish Baked with Tomato Sauce.
Prepare a fish of about 4 pounds, put in a buttered pan, cover with tomato pulp, sprinkle liberally with bread crumbs, and dot with bits of butter. Place in oven forty minutes, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK until the flesh begins to separate from the back bone.
Cod Steaks à la Cardinal (French recipe).
Cut 3 pounds fresh cod into slices an inch thick; sprinkle with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, fasten each slice with a toothpick to give it a neat shape. Brush the fish with warmed butter, lay it on the bottom of a large saucepan, pour over it a cupful white stock, and cover closely, first with buttered paper, then with the pan lid. Simmer gently for twenty to twenty-five minutes, take skewers and arrange the fish neatly on a hot dish; pour over it tomato sauce, flavored with essence of anchovy; garnish round the edge with sprigs of fresh parsley and slices of lemon.
Five fish recipes run together here, the first of them only a tail end whose opening paragraph belongs to the previous page. The cooking times are the main thing a modern cook needs to argue with.
- Oven temperaturesPeriod usage is loose and the tables disagree; "hot" and "quick" oven both fall somewhere around 400-450F, and the two terms were often used interchangeably. The tomato-topped bluefish, given no descriptor, will do at the lower end of that range.
- Ten minutes to the poundA common period rule, and it overcooks fish. Thickness governs cooking, not weight: figure about 10 minutes per inch at 400F, and pull the fish when the flesh turns opaque and flakes at the thickest point. Current food-safety guidance is 145F; many cooks take fish off nearer 130-140F. The stuffed bluefish will not want a full hour unless it is a large whole fish.
- The gratingThe cod is set on a rack or trivet inside the roasting pan with stock beneath it, so the fish steams and the drippings fall clear into the liquid for the sauce. Any wire rack that fits the pan does the job.
- Veal stock and white stockBoth mean an unbrowned stock, veal or chicken. Fish stock or a light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything heavily seasoned, as it reduces into the sauce.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, kept in a jar. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so allow substantially more -- up to twice as much -- or make a conventional roux and accept a paler sauce.
- Larding porkFatty salt pork, cut into strips and pushed into the gashes. Blanch it briefly if it is very salty, and cut back the teaspoon of salt in the stuffing accordingly. Thick-cut fatty bacon works.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled anchovy extract, now uncommon in American shops though still sold in Britain. Anchovy paste, about a teaspoon to a cup of sauce, gives the same effect; taste before adding further salt.
- Sewing the head downThe bluefish is gutted through the gills so the belly stays whole and holds stuffing. A trussing needle and cotton twine, or three or four wooden picks, will close it. Ask the fishmonger to gut through the gills; it is not standard practice now.
- YieldThe 4 lb whole bluefish serves four to six once head and bone are allowed for; the 3 lb of cod slices serves six. Bluefish is oily and strongly flavoured, which is why the treatments here lean on lemon and tomato.
The cookery section here runs under the head Mrs. Curtis's Cookbook, bound together with Household Discoveries, and this page shows the compiler's method plainly: recipes lifted with attribution from the best-known American cooking authorities of the day. Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, whose Common Sense in the Household (1871) sold in enormous numbers; Mrs. Rorer is Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School, probably the most influential cooking teacher in the country at the turn of the century. Bluefish earns its own recipe because it was cheap, abundant along the Atlantic seaboard, and too oily to keep well, so it was eaten fresh and in quantity wherever it was landed. "À la Cardinal" conventionally signals a red sauce, traditionally said to be named for the colour of a cardinal's robes and classically built on lobster coral; this cook's tomato-and-anchovy version is a plainer household reading of the same idea.