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Baked Bluefish, Florentine
Neatly clean and wipe well a three-pound piece boned bluefish. Place it in a lightly buttered tin. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Spread a tablespoon melted butter over the fish and set in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes.
Thoroughly strain a pint canned spinach. Season with half teaspoon salt, one teaspoon fine sugar and half teaspoon white pepper; then hash up very fine and spread over the fish. Bake for ten minutes longer. Remove, dress on a hot dish, pour a gill tomato sauce around the dish, squeeze the juice of a sound lemon over the spinach and serve.
A straightforward oven dish whose only real difficulties are an oven temperature the author never gives and a spinach step written for a canned product few cooks buy now.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, but a total bake of 25 minutes for a three-pound piece implies a fairly hot oven — 400F. Bluefish is done at an internal 145F and the flakes should just separate; at that thickness it will likely arrive there before the full time elapses.
- A gillHalf a cup. That is a modest amount of tomato sauce poured around the platter rather than over the fish, so the spinach stays green; have more warm sauce at the table.
- "A tin"A shallow metal baking pan or roasting tin, not a covered casserole. The fish should sit in a single uncrowded layer so the surface dries and browns instead of steaming.
- Canned spinachA pint of canned spinach, thoroughly strained as the recipe directs, comes to something in the region of 8 to 10 oz of drained leaf. Frozen chopped spinach works better: thaw a 10-oz block, then squeeze it hard in a towel. Wet spinach will flood the pan and slacken the sauce.
- The seasoning of the spinachA teaspoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of white pepper against a pint of strained spinach reads oddly now; the sugar may well be there to offset the flat, tinny edge of canned greens. With fresh or frozen spinach, cut the sugar to a pinch or leave it out.
- Order of operationsThe spinach goes on only for the last ten minutes. Pile it on at the start and it will draw moisture out of the fish and stew the top.
- Buying the fishBluefish is oily and turns strong quickly, which may be part of why the recipe opens by insisting the piece be cleaned and wiped well. Buy it the day you cook it, and skin-on fillets rather than a whole boned side if that is what the counter has.
- YieldThree pounds of boned fish serves four generously, five at a stretch. Add the lemon at the table, not in the oven, or the acid dulls the spinach.
"Florentine" on a menu means, almost without exception, served on a bed of spinach, a convention French kitchens attached to Florence and to Catherine de' Medici, who is traditionally credited with bringing Italian cooks and a fondness for spinach to the French court — a story repeated for centuries but thinly documented. What is telling here is not the name but the pint of canned spinach: a chef could by now specify a commercially canned vegetable in a hotel-style dish without apology. Bluefish itself is an American touch — abundant along the Atlantic coast and cheap in season — and dressing it with a French garnish and a spoonful of tomato sauce is exactly the sort of cross-breeding these compilations were assembled to show.