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Fish a La Creme
Mrs. J. A. Ellis.
Take any firm salt water fish, rub it with salt and put it in a kettle with enough boiling water to cover it. As soon as it boils set it back where it will simmer, let it stand for an hour, then take it up and draw out all the bones. Put one ounce of flour into a sauce-pan, to which add by degrees one quart of cream or new milk, mixing it very smoothly, then add the juice of one lemon, one onion chopped fine, a bunch of parsley, a little nutmeg, salt and pepper. Put this on the fire, stirring it till it forms a thick sauce; stir in a quarter of a pound of butter; strain the sauce through a sieve. Put a little on a dish, then lay the fish on it and turn the remainder of the sauce over it. Beat to a froth the whites of six eggs, spread over the whole, and bake half an hour a light brown.
A Victorian baked fish in cream sauce under a meringue of egg whites. Two instructions in the original will spoil it if followed literally: the poaching time and the baking time.
- "Salt water fish" is not salt fishThis means an ocean fish rather than a freshwater one — cod, haddock, halibut, striped bass. It has not been salted or cured; the rubbing with salt just before poaching is seasoning.
- The hour of simmeringAn hour is a very long time for fish. The instruction assumes a whole fish of several pounds, bones in, brought to a boil and then set back to hold at a bare simmer rather than a rolling one; the bones are drawn out afterwards. Modern practice is to poach at a bare shiver, 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness, and stop when the flesh just parts.
- An ounce of flour to a quartThat is roughly a quarter cup of flour thickening four cups of liquid, which gives a pouring sauce rather than a coating one. The quarter pound of butter (one stick) stirred in at the end enriches but does not thicken. If you want it to cling to the fish, double the flour.
- New milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and turned in an unrefrigerated larder. Whole milk or light cream is the equivalent.
- Lemon juice and dairyA quart of milk with a whole lemon's juice added before heating will curdle. Build and thicken the sauce first, then stir the lemon juice in off the heat, a little at a time.
- StrainingThe onion, parsley and any lumps are strained out — the aromatics are there to flavour the sauce, not to be eaten. Chop the onion fine and give it a few minutes in the milk before straining, or it will taste raw.
- The oven and the meringue'Bake half an hour a light brown' is longer than six beaten whites need, and they may weep or collapse. The recipe names no oven heat; around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes is enough to set and colour the top, and the fish underneath is already cooked.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight or yield. A 2 to 3 lb fish with a quart of sauce would serve roughly six to eight as a main course. A shallow, wide dish helps the meringue cover everything.
The Home Cook Book was one of the earliest and most widely copied American community cookbooks — compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, sold for charitable benefit, and imitated across the country for decades afterward. The attribution to Mrs. J. A. Ellis is characteristic of the genre: a recipe carried its contributor's name as a kind of guarantee. Cream sauces and French-styled dish names were fashionable on middle-class English and American tables by mid-century, and finishing a baked dish with a froth of beaten whites has older English precedent.