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Baked Flounders
Take two flounders, clean and split, and take out all the small bones. Lay the fish in a buttered dish and strew over some chopped mushrooms, parsley, green onions and rasped breadcrumbs; season with salt, pepper and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Put a few pieces of butter on the top, and bake. Make a sufficient quantity of caper sauce, flavoring it with essence of anchovy and the juice of half a lemon. When cooked, drain the butter from the fish, pour over the sauce, and serve.
Baked Flounders, Italian Style Clean and prepare the fish as for boiling; put it into an oval-shaped bakingpan with one ounce of soft butter spread over it; pour over half a pint of white wine, and season with salt and pepper; then add three quarters of a pint of Italian sauce and sprinkle the top thickly with bread raspings. Place the pan on top of the fire for about five minutes to start the boiling, then put it in a moderate oven for a quarter of an hour. Serve it in the pan in which it was cooked.
Two versions of the same dish, both written for a kitchen that assumed a stock pot of sauce was already simmering. The work is in the sauce, not the fish.
- Oven heat"A moderate oven" is roughly 350 to 375F. For the first version, which gives no time at all, a split flounder under crumbs and butter needs about 15 to 20 minutes at that heat; it is done when the flesh parts from the frame at the thickest point.
- Do not overbakeFlounder is thin and lean, and the whole dish turns to cotton if it dries. The Italian version's quarter of an hour in a moderate oven, after five minutes brought to a boil on the stovetop, suits a small fish; the recipe does not say what size fish is intended.
- Bread raspingsRaspings are the dried outer crust of a loaf grated fine, drier and coarser than fresh crumbs. Toasted panko or oven-dried crumbs give the same effect; fresh soft crumbs will go soggy under the wine and sauce.
- Essence of anchovyA thin, salty commercial anchovy extract, once sold in bottles. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a teaspoon of colatura, does the job. Add it off the heat and taste before salting the sauce further.
- Italian sauceSauce italienne: a brown sauce (or reduced veal stock) with a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots, white wine, and chopped parsley and ham. Three quarters of a pint is 1 1/2 cups, and the recipe assumes you have the base already made.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of white wine is one cup; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons. "An oval-shaped bakingpan" simply means a dish that fits the fish without crowding, since the second version is served in it.
- Boning"Clean and split, and take out all the small bones" most likely means splitting the fish along the backbone and lifting out the frame; the text does not say more than that. A fishmonger will do this on request; four flounder fillets laid in pairs work as well.
- YieldTwo flounders serve two generously, or four as a first course. The caper sauce and lemon in the first version are the whole point of the dish, so make enough to coat rather than merely moisten.
Flounder was one of the cheap, abundant flatfish of the New York market, and the recipe treats it with the same French sauce vocabulary applied to turbot or sole: caper sauce with anchovy essence in one version, sauce italienne in the other. The "Italian style" label here refers to that sauce, not to any Italian cooking tradition; sauce italienne is a French classical preparation, a brown sauce finished with a mushroom-and-shallot duxelles, and its name is generally traced to the Italian influence on early French court cookery rather than to any dish served in Italy. The instruction to start the pan on the fire before it goes to the oven, and to serve the fish in the vessel it cooked in, are marks of a professional kitchen working at speed.