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Bluefish, Sweet-Pepper Butter
Remove bones and neatly wipe a three-pound fresh bluefish. Season all over with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, rub all over with a tablespoon oil, then broil on brisk fire for six minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, spread sweet-pepper butter over surface and keep dish at oven door for ten minutes, basting fish with butter once in a while. Remove, decorate with a little parsley greens and six quarters lemon and serve.
A plain broiled fish with a compound butter, written for a coal range where the "oven door" was a reliable warm spot. Two things need translating: the heat source and the butter that gives the dish its name.
- Sweet-pepper butterThe recipe gives no formula, so it was either printed elsewhere in the volume or assumed knowledge. The likely reading is a compound butter: roasted, skinned and pounded sweet red pepper worked into softened butter with a little salt. Something in the region of 3-4 tablespoons butter to one large roasted pepper, well drained so the butter does not break when it melts, works -- though the proportions are a modern guess.
- "Brisk fire"A hot broiler or grill, close to the heat. On a modern oven that means the top rack under a preheated broiler; on charcoal, a bed of coals you cannot hold a hand over.
- Six minutes a sideShort for a whole three-pound fish, which suggests it is split or boned so it lies flat. 'Remove bones' probably means opening it out along the backbone, though the recipe does not say so.
- DonenessBluefish is done at 135-140F at the thickest point, when the flesh has just lost its translucence. It is a fatty fish and forgiving of a hot fire, but it turns dry and cottony if pushed past that.
- "Keep dish at oven door"A warming spot rather than a cooking one; the book gives no temperature. A modern oven set to its lowest setting, or turned off after preheating, does the same job. The ten minutes are for melting and basting, not further cooking.
- The dark lineBluefish carries a strong-flavored dark strip of muscle along the lateral line. Trimming it away before broiling is standard practice now and makes a marked difference in a fish this size.
- FreshnessBluefish oxidizes fast and the flavor goes sharply fishy within a day or two. Buy it the day you cook it and reject anything smelling of anything but seawater.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; the six lemon quarters suggest as many as six portions from the three-pound fish.
Bluefish was one of the great cheap abundances of the American Atlantic coast, hauled in large quantities off New York and New Jersey through the nineteenth century and too oily to travel far inland before refrigeration. It appears regularly in East Coast cookbooks of the period. The sweet-pepper butter follows the French kitchen's answer to a strong fish: beurre composé, a flavoured butter melted over grilled flesh in place of a made sauce, a technique long codified in professional French practice and familiar in American hotel cooking of the period. Pairing it with a local fish rather than sole or turbot is exactly the sort of graft that a volume calling itself an international cook book existed to make.