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Deviled Fillets of Fish
2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon hot water 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce teaspoon salt teaspoon paprika ½ cup cracker crumbs seasoned Mix mustard, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, salt and paprika. Wipe and broil the fish, spread with mustard mixture, roll in crumbs, and broil until crumbs are brown. Serve hot, with sauce tartare or tomato tartare. 6 fillets of sole
A quick broiler dish: fish cooked first, then coated with a sharp mustard paste and crumbs and returned to the heat only long enough to brown. The mustard quantity has dropped out of the ingredient list, so work from the proportions of the other seasonings.
- The mustardThe instruction calls for mustard but the list gives no amount. For 6 sole fillets, 1 to 2 tablespoons of prepared mustard (or 1 teaspoon dry mustard slaked in the hot water) matches the 2 tablespoons lemon juice and 1 teaspoon Worcestershire. Taste the paste before it goes on the fish.
- Missing fractionsThe salt and paprika are each given as "teaspoon" with no fraction, the numerals having dropped out. For this quantity of fish, something like 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon paprika would be a reasonable reading.
- "Deviled"Here deviled means mustard, paprika and Worcestershire rather than chopped ham or hard-boiled egg. The heat should be assertive; the paste is a thin coating, not a sauce.
- Broil twice, brieflySole fillets take roughly 3 to 4 minutes total under a hot broiler, about 4 inches from the element. Stop while the flesh is barely opaque, since the second pass to brown the crumbs adds another minute or two of cooking.
- Cracker crumbs"Cracker crumbs seasoned" means crushed crackers mixed with a little salt and pepper; plain soda crackers, crushed fine, are the likely intent. Panko is too coarse to cling to the mustard paste; a fine dry crumb browns evenly in the short time given.
- Keep the crumbs from burningDry crumbs under a broiler scorch faster than they colour. Dot or brush the coated fillets with a little melted butter before the second pass so the surface browns rather than blackens in patches.
- Sauce tartare or tomato tartareSauce tartare is mayonnaise-based, and tomato tartare appears to be the same with tomato purée or catsup beaten in. Made with raw yolks in the period manner, they are best assembled from pasteurised egg or bottled mayonnaise today.
- YieldSix fillets serve three to six people depending on the size of the sole; allow about 6 oz of fish per main course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is remembered for its confectionery, but like many promotional cookbooks of the era it seems to have aimed at being a complete household manual, hence a full fish chapter. "Deviling" in Anglo-American cookery had by then settled into a fairly fixed formula of mustard, Worcestershire and red pepper applied to something already cooked or nearly so, a technique often traced to the late eighteenth century as a way to enliven leftover meat and bones and said to have migrated to fish, kidneys and crab. Sole was the prestige flatfish of American hotel menus in this period, though what reached many kitchens under that name may well have been flounder or a similar local flatfish. The finishing pass under the broiler with cracker crumbs is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American cooking, where fine soda-cracker crumbs did the work later given to breadcrumbs.