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Bluefish, Havanaise
Scale, remove head and fins from a three-and-a-half-pound fresh bluefish. Split in two through the back and remove spinal bone. Finely slice two thick, sound green peppers and lightly fry in a pan with a teaspoon good oil, then place in a mortar with a small branch of tarragon and pound exceedingly fine, add a half ounce butter, pound again until well amalgamated, then press it through a sieve into a bowl. Season fish with teaspoon salt and carefully rub butter on the cut-side parts of fish. Place in a baking dish, squeeze over juice of half a sound lemon, let stand in a moderate temperature to infuse for thirty minutes.
Finely slice three peeled bananas, arrange them one beside another over the bluefish so as to entirely cover it. Cut two sweet Spanish peppers in julienne strips and arrange crosswise on the bananas, squeeze juice of the other half lemon over, cover with lightly buttered paper. Set in oven to bake forty-five minutes, being careful to baste fish with its juice once in a while. Remove, lift up the paper and send to table in same dish.
A split, stuffed-and-blanketed baked fish in the Delmonico manner, with two things a modern cook should adjust: the oven time and the reading of "moderate temperature."
- The forty-five minutesA 3½-lb bluefish split flat through the back is a thin piece of fish; forty-five minutes will dry it out entirely. Bake at 350F until the thickest part reads 130-135F, roughly 25-30 minutes, and let the banana layer take the direct heat.
- "A moderate temperature to infuse"This is the resting step, not the oven. Leave the buttered, salted, lemoned fish at cool room temperature for the thirty minutes so the seasoning penetrates, then bake.
- Oven settingThe recipe names no oven temperature (its one use of 'moderate' belongs to the thirty-minute resting step). 'Moderate' in books of this vintage is generally read as somewhere in the region of 350-375F; 350F is the safe choice here, and there is no need to go hotter, since the covering of banana and pepper is meant to steam rather than brown.
- Two kinds of pepperThe 'green peppers' pounded into the butter are fresh sweet green bell peppers. The 'sweet Spanish peppers' cut in julienne are most likely red pimiento-type peppers, though the recipe does not specify; jarred pimientos or roasted red peppers are the easiest modern stand-in — drain and pat them dry before arranging.
- Mortar and sieveThe pounding and sieving produce a smooth green pepper-tarragon butter. A small food processor does it in seconds, but still push the paste through a fine sieve — the skins will not break down and will read as strings in the finished butter.
- Buttered paperParchment, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the banana slices from scorching and the fish from drying; foil works but traps more steam, so leave it loose.
- BananasUse firm, barely-ripe fruit sliced lengthwise or on a slant about ¼ inch thick. Very ripe bananas collapse into sweetness and lose the point, which is a mild starchy blanket over an oily fish.
- The fish itselfBluefish is high in oil and turns strong-tasting within a day or two of the catch, which is why the recipe insists on "fresh" and leans on lemon. Mackerel or Spanish mackerel behaves the same way if bluefish is unavailable.
- YieldA 3½-lb fish, headless and boned, serves four generously as a main course. Send it to table in the baking dish as directed — the juices are the sauce.
"Havanaise" is simply Havana-style, and in the international kitchen of the early 1900s the label meant bananas and sweet peppers, the two Caribbean ingredients that had become reliably available in New York markets once steamers began carrying Cuban and Central American fruit north in quantity. The dish belongs to the era's habit of pinning a geographic name onto a classic French technique: the pounded, sieved compound butter and the buttered paper are straight out of the professional repertoire, while the fish is thoroughly local, a catch on the Atlantic seaboard, oily enough to stand up to fruit and citrus. Combinations of this kind circulated widely in hotel and restaurant cookery of the period, and their "national" names generally tell you more about what a hotel kitchen could buy than about what anyone in Havana was cooking.