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Pickled Fish
Cut into slices the required quantity of any kind of fish, dust over well with flour and put them into a fryingpan with oil to fry. Have in a mortar two or three sprigs of mint, one fresh capsicum and salt to taste, and pound well together; pour in slowly two breakfast cupfuls of vinegar, turn the whole into a saucepan and boil for five or six minutes. Take out the fish and drain it, pour over the hot vinegar. Serve when quite cold.
This is escabeche in its plainest form: fish fried, then steeped in a hot spiced vinegar and served cold. A few of Oscar's terms need translating, and the fish needs a little more care than the text implies.
- The hinge: fry it dry and crispThe flour crust is what keeps the slices from disintegrating in the vinegar. Get the oil hot enough to brown the fish properly and drain it well before the vinegar goes on, or the coating turns to paste.
- CapsicumIn late-nineteenth-century kitchen English a "fresh capsicum" normally means a hot chile pepper rather than a sweet bell pepper. A single small fresh chile is a reasonable reading, though the recipe specifies neither colour nor whether to seed it.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is generally reckoned at about 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so two cupfuls is somewhere between a pint and a pint and a quarter of vinegar. A plain distilled white or cider vinegar is probably nearer what was meant than a modern wine vinegar.
- Mortar workPound the mint, chile and salt to a coarse paste before the vinegar goes in; adding the liquid slowly helps work the pounded aromatics through the vinegar rather than leaving them floating on top. A small food processor does the job if the mortar is not to hand.
- The five-minute boilBoiling takes some of the raw edge off the vinegar and softens the chile. The recipe's five or six minutes is enough; longer boiling will dull the mint's colour and flavour.
- Choice of fish"Any kind of fish" works best with firm, oily fish cut into slices about half an inch thick -- mackerel, bluefish, sardines or small mullet. Delicate flaking white fish is more likely to break up in the marinade.
- Cooling and keepingCool the dish uncovered, then refrigerate. It is better after a night in the acid and should be eaten within three or four days; this is a marinade, not a preserve, and it does not make the fish shelf-stable.
- YieldA pint of vinegar will cover roughly a pound to a pound and a half of sliced fish, but the recipe leaves the quantity open ("the required quantity"), so scale the vinegar to the fish you have.
Vinegar-steeped fried fish under one name or another turns up all round the Mediterranean and its former trade routes: sardines and mackerel are still eaten this way in Spain, southern Italy and the Philippines, and England has its own "soused" or "pickled" fish, recorded long before Oscar Tschirky put it in print. The method began as preservation: frying dries the surface and the hot acid bath buys a few days in a kitchen without refrigeration. By the time it reached the Waldorf it had become a cold appetizer, valued for the mint and chile rather than the keeping. Its presence in a hotel cookbook of 1896 is a reminder of how much of that grand-hotel repertoire was borrowed frugal cooking, dressed up and served on a chilled plate.