Hake Au Gratin
Take baking pan. Add a little oil or butter. Have hake split. Lay in pan.
Chop up one onion, little garlic, tomato and spread over fish. Sprinkle a few bread crumbs with a little thyme over fish. Take small pieces of butter and distribute on crumbs in different parts of fish. Put in oven and let bake about 15 minutes. If fish looks as if it is cooking dry, add a little water. Season with salt and pepper to suit. Moderate oven.
A plain baked-fish formula with no measurements beyond one onion — the proportions are meant to be judged by the size of the fish. A few points make it repeatable.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere between 350F and 375F. At that heat a split hake of about 2 lb wants 20-25 minutes rather than 15; the fish is done when the flesh at the thickest point flakes and reads 145F.
- "Have hake split"This means having the whole fish opened flat: head and guts off, cut along the backbone so the two sides lie open (the bone may or may not be taken out). Two skin-on hake fillets of 6-8 oz each work in much the same way and cook faster, in about 15 minutes as written.
- The hinge: the crumb layer must not sit wetOnion, tomato and garlic all release liquid, and if the crumbs are buried under them they steam into paste. Spread the vegetables thinly, then scatter the crumbs on top so they stay in contact with the dry oven air and the butter dots can crisp them.
- Hake is fragileIt has a softer, more delicate flake than cod and collapses if moved while hot. Bake and serve in the same dish, and lift portions with a wide fish slice.
- The tomatoOne medium tomato, seeded and chopped, is enough for a whole fish. Seeds and jelly are the main source of extra liquid in the dish; the recipe anticipates the fish cooking dry and says to add water, but in practice the opposite problem is the more common one.
- Thyme and garlic quantitiesA teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves, or a scant half teaspoon dried, and one clove of garlic, is a fair reading of "a little."
- SeasoningSeason the fish itself with salt and pepper before the vegetables go on, not only at the end as the text implies. Salt on the surface of a split fish 10-15 minutes ahead firms the flesh slightly.
- YieldA 2 lb split hake serves two generously or three with potatoes and a green vegetable.
Hake was for a long time the cheap alternative to cod in Britain and on the American East Coast — abundant, soft-fleshed, and quick to spoil, which kept its price low and its reputation modest. "Au gratin" here means only what the French word originally described: "gratin" is generally traced to gratter, to scrape, and referred first to the crusty scrapings left in the dish — in this case a top of buttered crumbs, rather than the cheese-and-cream casserole the phrase has come to suggest in English. The onion-garlic-tomato-thyme combination may suggest a southern European handling of hake, though four common ingredients are thin evidence for any particular origin. Its appearance in a bride's cookbook is characteristic of the genre: an inexpensive fish, a single pan, no sauce to break, and a technique a new householder could not easily ruin.