Home › The World's Kitchen › Bluefish, Diaz
Bluefish, Diaz
Procure half a very fresh bluefish of about three pounds. Neatly trim and remove the bones. Pound in a mortar four sweet red peppers, then rub through a sieve into a bowl, add one teaspoon anchovy essence, juice of half a sound lemon, half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Thoroughly mix. Make a few light incisions on skin of the bluefish, then sharply rub fish all around with the pulp. Lay in a baking dish and let infuse one hour. Pour over half gill white wine.
Peel, wash and carefully drain six sound, fresh mushrooms, slice very fine and arrange on top of the fish; divide one-half ounce butter in small bits all over the fish, then set in oven forty-five minutes, being very careful to baste once in a while. Remove, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A pepper-and-anchovy rub, a splash of wine, mushrooms and butter over an oily fish. The whole thing works except the baking time, which belongs to a heavier era of fish cookery.
- Cut the time, not the heatHalf a three-pound bluefish, boned, is a fillet of roughly a pound and a quarter. Forty-five minutes will dry it out completely; at 400F it is done in 15 to 20 minutes, when the flesh just flakes at the thickest point. Baste once at the halfway mark.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderately hot oven, 400F, gives you enough surface heat to concentrate the wine and brown the butter in the short time the fish needs.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, 2 fl oz. Dry white wine; it is there to keep the dish from drying and to lift the anchovy.
- Sweet red peppersThese are fresh red peppers of the pimiento type, not dried chiles and not paprika (the paprika is listed separately). Roasting and peeling them before pounding gives a smoother pulp than raw pounding, and a food processor replaces the mortar. Four peppers yields far more rub than one fillet needs.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled condiment, essentially anchovy reduced with vinegar and spice. Anchovy paste is the closest thing on a shelf today; use about a teaspoon, or two fillets mashed.
- Freshness is not decorative"Very fresh" is repeated for a reason. Bluefish is high in oil and the oil turns rank faster than in most fish, which is why it is rarely shipped far. Buy it the day you cook it, or use mackerel, Spanish mackerel or striped bass.
- The hour of infusingAn hour in the pepper rub is a marinade, not a cure, and the lemon juice will begin to firm the surface of the flesh. Refrigerate during that hour and bring the dish to room temperature before it goes in the oven.
- Mushrooms"Peel" reflects the older habit of skinning cultivated mushrooms; wipe them instead. Sliced very fine, they cook through in the same short time as the fish.
- YieldHalf a three-pound fish serves two generously, three at a stretch, with bread or potatoes.
Bluefish is an Atlantic fish of the American coast, abundant, cheap and strongly flavored, and it appears in New York cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in this manner: masked with something assertive, peppers, mustard, anchovy, to meet its oily richness halfway. The single-name title is characteristic of the period's grand-hotel cooking, where dishes were often christened after patrons, colleagues or public figures and the name carried no information about the method; what "Diaz" refers to is not recorded in the recipe itself. The anchovy essence in the seasoning is one of the older English bottled sauces that professional kitchens kept for exactly this purpose, a shortcut to savory depth.