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Baked Bluefish, Mustard Sauce
Scale and remove the bones from a three-pound fresh bluefish and place on a lightly buttered tin, season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Squeeze juice of half a sound lemon, and spread a half ounce butter over, cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, then set in the oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, lift up with a skimmer, lay it on a hot dish, pour a mustard sauce over and serve.
A plain baked fillet that depends almost entirely on not overcooking it. The book assumes a fishmonger has done the boning and that a mustard sauce is already made from another page.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as the original assumes a coal range judged by hand. Bake at 400F; the thirty-five minutes suggested suits a whole boned three-pound fish, but boneless fillets an inch thick will be done in 12 to 15 minutes.
- The hinge: internal temperatureBluefish is soft-fleshed and goes dry and cottony fast. Pull it at 130-135F at the thickest point, or when the flesh just separates into flakes under gentle pressure.
- "A lightly buttered tin"Any shallow sheet pan or gratin dish. Butter it generously rather than lightly, or line with parchment, since bluefish skin sticks hard.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to fit and buttered on the underside, laid over the fish, the same idea as a cartouche. It keeps the surface from drying out, and modern parchment does the job as intended. Foil traps more moisture and will steam the fish more.
- "A sound lemon"Simply an unblemished one, not a variety. Half a lemon over three pounds of fish is restrained; taste and add more at the table.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon, dotted over the surface rather than melted and poured.
- Mustard sauceThe recipe assumes a sauce given elsewhere in the book; most likely a butter-and-flour white sauce or veloute finished with prepared mustard, on the order of two tablespoons mustard to a cup of sauce, stirred in off the heat so it does not turn bitter. Have it ready before the fish comes out.
- Buying bluefishIt is an oily fish that turns strong and metallic within a day or two, which is why the original insists on fresh. Buy it the day you cook it, and if the flesh smells of anything but the sea, choose something else.
- YieldA three-pound fish, boned, serves four generously as a main course.
Bluefish was one of the great cheap abundances of the American Atlantic coast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, landed in enormous quantities off New Jersey and Long Island and sold in East Coast markets at a fraction of the price of bass or halibut. Because it is oily and does not travel or keep, it seldom appears in nineteenth-century English and French cookbooks, though the species itself ranges well beyond American waters. The pairing with mustard is a common nineteenth-century answer to a rich, strong-flavoured fish: mackerel and herring were often sent to the table with a sharp mustard butter or sauce, the acidity and heat cutting oil that a plain lemon alone would not manage.