Home › The World's Kitchen › Bluefish, Creole
Bluefish, Creole
Remove bones from a fresh three-pound bluefish, place in a lightly buttered tin, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, baste with a little melted butter, set to bake in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove and dress on a baking dish. Pour a Creole sauce and sprinkle a little bread crumbs over the fish, place in oven for fifteen minutes, remove, cut a sound lemon in half, finely slice, arrange it around dish and serve.
A two-stage bake in the Delmonico's style: cook the fish plain, then sauce and glaze it. The instructions assume you already have Creole sauce on hand and that the oven is set to the book's default moderate heat.
- The hinge: total oven timeTwenty-five minutes plain plus fifteen under sauce is forty minutes for a three-pound fish, which will leave it dry and flaky-dry rather than moist. Bake until the thickest part just flakes and reads about 135F, then give it only long enough under the sauce and crumbs to heat through and brown, five to eight minutes.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated, as was normal in cookbooks of this period. Take "bake in oven" here as a moderate oven, 350 to 375F, and finish the crumbed stage at the same heat or briefly under the broiler for colour.
- "A tin" and "a baking dish"The tin is presumably a shallow metal pan for the first bake. The fish is then moved to a separate baking dish for saucing; the text does not say what it is made of, though a shallow dish suitable for serving would suit the method.
- Creole sauceThe recipe assumes you have it already, presumably from elsewhere in the book; period Creole sauces are tomato-based with onion and green pepper. Have it thick, since a thin sauce will flood the dish and steam the crumbs instead of browning them.
- Buying the fishBluefish is oily and turns strong-tasting within a day or two of the catch, which may be why the original specifies "fresh." Buy it the day you cook it, or substitute mackerel, mahi or striped bass. "Remove bones" means having the three-pound fish boned, whether filleted or boned whole.
- "A sound lemon"Simply an unblemished one, with no soft or mouldy spots. Slice it thin and ring the dish after it leaves the oven; baked lemon slices go bitter.
- Seasoning and yieldA teaspoon of salt for three pounds of fish is about right for the flesh, since the sauce carries its own seasoning. Half a teaspoon of paprika is for colour as much as flavour; a sweet paprika suits. Serves four generously, six as part of a longer menu.
Bluefish was one of the cheapest and most abundant fish on the American Atlantic coast around 1900, landed in quantity from New Jersey to Long Island and sold in New York markets, so cookbooks of the period print it constantly. The "Creole" label attached to almost any dish finished with a tomato, onion and green pepper sauce, a shorthand generally traced to New Orleans cookery and by this date thoroughly absorbed into hotel and restaurant French across the country. The construction here is a restaurant one: fish baked plain, transferred to a serving dish, masked with a sauce made separately, crumbed and glazed. That is the working method of a professional kitchen, and it explains why the recipe assumes a stocked saucier's larder and never bothers to name an oven temperature.