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Baked Bluefish, Au Paprika
Neatly trim and thoroughly wipe a three-pound piece of very fresh, boned bluefish and season it with a teaspoon salt. Mix on a plate a half ounce butter with one teaspoon paprika, then briskly rub the bluefish with it; place the fish in a lightly buttered tin with half gill white wine and set in the oven to bake for thirty minutes. Remove, dress the fish on a large dish, pour over the juice from the pan, decorate the fish with six quarters of lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A very short recipe that leaves out the oven temperature and assumes a cook who knows when fish is done. The measurements are small and easily converted.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup of white wine. It is barely enough to film the pan, which is the point: this is a bake, not a braise.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon, softened, worked on a plate with the paprika into a paste before rubbing it over the fish.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, is a reasonable modern choice for a piece this size; the recipe itself offers no guidance either way.
- Doneness over timingThirty minutes may be more than a boned piece needs if it is not thick. Start checking at twenty minutes and pull it at 145F at the thickest point, when the flesh is just opaque and parts under a fork. Bluefish is oily and forgiving, but it still dries.
- PaprikaUse sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked and not hot, and buy it fresh — stale paprika is dusty and bitter, and here it is the entire seasoning apart from salt. Do not let it scorch on the pan bottom.
- "Very fresh"Not a flourish. Bluefish has a high oil content that turns strong and fishy within a day or two, which is why it was historically eaten close to where it was landed. If it smells assertive raw, it will taste worse cooked.
- The pan juicesThey are the sauce. There is nothing to reduce or thicken, so spoon them over at the table; the butter and wine will have loosened the paprika into a thin orange liquor.
- YieldA three-pound boned piece serves four to six as a main course. The original calls for six lemon quarters as garnish.
Bluefish was one of the great cheap abundances of the American Atlantic coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — schooling, aggressive, landed in quantity off New York and New Jersey, and treated by cookbooks of the period as an everyday fish rather than a delicacy. Its oiliness suited it to broiling and baking. The paprika treatment here fits the broader vogue for paprika in professional hotel and restaurant cooking of the same years, when it was becoming a familiar rather than exotic seasoning; dishes labelled au paprika of this period usually meant nothing more elaborate than a paprika-and-butter rub or a paprika-tinted cream sauce. The recipe's brevity — no oven temperature, no doneness cue — assumes a reader who has baked a fish before.