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Bluefish, Jaffa
Scale, cut off fins and remove all bones from a fresh three-pound bluefish. Place it in a lightly buttered baking dish, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon curry powder. Mix on a plate half ounce butter with a teaspoon anchovy paste, then neatly spread it over the bluefish, set in oven for twenty-five minutes, being careful to frequently baste it with butter, and remove to oven door. Place two ounces peeled almonds and one tablespoon capers in a small saucepan with a gill demi-glace and let boil for five minutes, then pour it over the fish. Sprinkle a tablespoon bread crumbs over, reset in oven for fifteen minutes longer, remove and send to table in same dish.
A Delmonico's-style baked fish with a curry-and-anchovy butter and a brown sauce finish. Two things need attention: the oven temperature is never stated, and the total cooking time is far too long for a boned fillet.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which is normal for recipes of this date. The book supplies no oven descriptor here at all, so any figure is a modern inference: a moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, will suit the dish.
- Total timeTwenty-five minutes plus a further fifteen is longer than a boned three-pound bluefish is likely to need at modern oven heats. Bake until the flesh just flakes at the thickest point -- for a whole boned fish of this size, roughly 20-30 minutes at 375F -- and add the sauce and crumbs only for the last few minutes.
- "Remove to oven door"This means move the dish to the oven door or the coolest part of the range to hold it warm while the sauce is made, not take it out of the oven entirely. A very low oven or a warm spot on the stovetop does the same job.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock and sauce espagnole, made in-house in a professional kitchen of the period. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute; a well-reduced brown stock will also carry the almonds and capers.
- Peeled almondsBlanched whole almonds. They contribute little unless browned, so toast them dry or in a little butter before they go into the sauce.
- Boning the fishBluefish has a dark, strongly flavoured strip of muscle along the lateral line. Trimming it out with the bones tempers the strongest of the flavour, though the fish is oily throughout and that is much of the reason for its assertive reputation.
- FreshnessBluefish is high in oil and goes rancid faster than lean white fish. It should smell clean and of the sea, and be cooked the day it is bought.
- YieldA three-pound fish, boned, serves four generously as a main course.
The International Cook Book is by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it includes recipes named for cities. Names of this kind were as much a menu convention as a claim of provenance: Jaffa, the ancient Mediterranean port south of Tel Aviv, was known to American readers of the period chiefly through the citrus trade and Holy Land travel writing, and the label here can be read as signalling the eastward gesture of the curry powder and almonds rather than any Palestinian cooking tradition. Bluefish itself is thoroughly local, an Atlantic coast fish that arrived in New York markets in quantity through the summer and was cheap enough to be treated liberally with butter, anchovy and a ladle of the kitchen's standing demi-glace. The combination of a French sauce base, a spoonful of curry powder and a strewing of buttered crumbs is characteristic of grand-hotel cooking around 1900, when a pinch of imported spice was enough to give a familiar fish a foreign name.