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Fish Au Gratin
1 cup white sauce. 3 lbs. fish. 1/2 cup Sherry wine. Boil fish until tender. Pull to pieces and take out all dark parts and bones. Put in baking dish. Pour over wine and the white sauce. Cover top with buttered bread crumbs. Run in oven to bake.
A spare set of instructions even by Mrs. Wilson's standards: no oven temperature, no baking time, and no seasoning beyond the sherry. Here is what the original assumes you already know.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; the recipe leaves it to the cook's judgment. A gratin of already-cooked fish only needs the crumbs browned and the sauce bubbling: 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler at the end.
- "Boil fish until tender" is too hardThree pounds of fish dropped into boiling water will shred and toughen before it flakes. Poach it at a bare shiver, barely 175F, until it just parts at the thickest point, about 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness. It gets a second cooking in the oven.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce of this period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk. One cup of it plus half a cup of sherry is a thin coating for three pounds of fish; make it on the stiff side, or make a cup and a half, or the dish will be soupy.
- The sherryHalf a cup of Sherry goes in raw and does not get long enough in the oven to cook off its edge. Simmering it down by half first, or stirring it into the hot sauce and letting it cook a minute, gives a rounder flavor.
- Season it yourselfThere is no salt, pepper, lemon or cheese in the list. Salt the poaching water, salt and pepper the sauce, and if you want the "au gratin" of the title as most cooks now understand it, a half cup of grated Gruyere or Parmesan in the sauce is within the spirit of the dish.
- Buttered bread crumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old loaf tossed with 2 to 3 tablespoons melted butter, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb the sauce and go pasty.
- Which fishAny firm white fish that flakes in large pieces: cod, haddock, halibut, pollock. The instruction to remove "all dark parts" refers to the dark lateral muscle, which is strong-tasting and which recipes of this kind commonly direct the cook to cut away.
- YieldThree pounds of fish serves about six as a main course, fewer if the three pounds is weighed whole and loses weight to skin and bone. A shallow baking dish keeps the layer thin enough to brown well.
Au gratin means cooked with a browned crust; the word is generally traced to the French gratter, to scrape, the gratin being the crusty matter scraped from the dish. Dishes of this type were one common use for cooked or leftover fish, and Mrs. Wilson, who wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and was associated with the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, built much of her reputation on exactly this kind of thrift: a sauce, a crumb topping, and nothing thrown away. The sherry is the one indulgence here. The care taken to "take out all dark parts" reflects an era when fish often arrived whole from the market and the cook did the butchering, and when the dark lateral muscle was considered coarse and best cut away.