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Catfish Stewed with Tomatoes
Slice the fish, each weighing about two ounces, and fry these with a very little butter or dripping. When they are partly browned and about half cooked, add one breakfast cupful of water, one or two minced green onions, and a pod of red pepper. Strain a can of tomatoes over a colander on to the fish, and cook together for half an hour, Serve with pieces of dry toast.
A plain river-fish stew from Oscar Tschirky's kitchen, built on canned tomatoes and a single pod of chile. The only real hazard is overcooking: catfish is delicate and thirty minutes in simmering tomato will shred it.
- The hinge: cooking timeHalf an hour is too long for two-ounce slices of catfish. Simmer the tomato, water, onion and pepper together for 20 minutes to lose the tinned edge, then return the part-fried fish for the last 8 to 10 minutes, until it flakes at 145F.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. One cup of water is a safe reading here; the strained tomato supplies most of the liquid.
- A can of tomatoesLate-nineteenth-century tomato cans commonly held around 2 lb, though sizes were not yet standardised, so a modern 28 oz can is a reasonable match. Straining through a colander was to hold back skins and seeds, not to discard the juice -- push the pulp and liquid through and leave the debris behind.
- Pod of red pepperA whole dried red chile, not a bell pepper; think a dried cayenne or a chile de arbol. The recipe does not say to take it out, though you may fish it out before serving. Half a teaspoon of red pepper flakes is a workable substitute.
- Green onionsPeriod usage generally means young spring onions with the tops. Use two, white and green parts both minced.
- DrippingRendered beef or bacon fat. Bacon fat suits catfish particularly well; butter alone may scorch at the heat needed to brown the fish, as the recipe directs.
- Fish sizeTwo-ounce slices most likely means a small catfish cut crosswise through the bone, bones and all. Skinless fillets cut into 2 oz pieces hold together less well, so turn them once at most.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity of fish or number of servings; about 2 lb of fish with a 28 oz can would serve four, with the toast standing in for the starch.
Catfish was a Southern and Midwestern river fish rather than a New York luxury, which is part of why its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is interesting: the book gathers workaday American dishes alongside the Waldorf's dining-room repertoire, and a homely stew of fish, canned tomatoes and a chile pod found a place among them. The reliance on a can of tomatoes suggests the late nineteenth century, when commercially canned tomatoes had become cheap and widely available enough that even the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel would call for them by the can rather than by the pound. The dry toast served underneath is generally traced to the older habit of using bread as the sop for a brothy dish, a practice often said to predate serving stews over rice or potatoes and still surviving in dishes like creamed cod on toast.