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Baked Perch, Finnoise
Trim off the fins and thoroughly wipe six fresh, fat perch, season them all around with one teaspoon salt and two saltspoons paprika, and arrange on a lightly buttered baking dish. Heat in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, add one finely chopped, fat, large, seeded green pepper and gently cook for four minutes, stirring meanwhile, then add two light tablespoons flour, stir well, pour in two gills pure tomato juice, add one teaspoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon salt, and two saltspoons pepper, continue mixing until it comes to a boil and let cook for ten minutes. Pour sauce and sprinkle two tablespoons bread crumbs over perch, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around the fish and serve.
A straightforward baked fish with a quick tomato-pepper sauce. The archaic measures are the only real obstacle.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of tomato juice. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so two saltspoons paprika is roughly 1/2 teaspoon, and the same for the pepper in the sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which was normal for cookbooks of this period. Bake at 400F; whole small perch or fillets under a sauce are done when the flesh flakes at the bone.
- Twenty-five minutes is longThat timing suits whole pan-dressed perch of about half a pound each. Fillets will be dry well before then — check at 12 to 15 minutes, when the thickest part reaches 145F.
- The sauce is a rouxCook the flour in the buttered pepper for a full minute before the tomato juice goes in, and add the juice gradually. The ten-minute simmer will cook out the raw flour taste; keep it loose enough to pour.
- Tomato juice"Pure tomato juice" most likely meant undiluted and unseasoned. Modern bottled juice is usually salted, so taste before adding the half teaspoon of salt to the sauce.
- Buying perchSix whole fat perch means yellow perch or a similar small panfish, scaled and gutted, heads on or off as you like. Perch fillets are small; allow two or three per person if substituting.
- The croutonsTriangles or hearts of white bread fried in butter until crisp, cut before frying. They are a garnish and a sauce-sopper; do them while the fish bakes so they stay crisp.
- YieldServes three to six depending on the size of the fish — one perch per person as a course, two as a main.
"Finnoise" is French kitchen shorthand for Finnish, and like most of the nationality tags in international cookbooks of the period it signals a general idea rather than a documented regional dish — here, freshwater perch, which is genuinely one of the staple fish of Finland and the Baltic. The paprika and green pepper seem to owe more to the Franco-American hotel kitchen than to anything Nordic; cookbooks of this period assigned foreign names freely to dishes built from a standard repertoire of sauces. Perch itself needed no introduction to American readers, being among the commonest catches of lakes and rivers, and the heart-shaped fried croutons are pure period service — a formal garnish often called for on dishes sent to table under a sauce.