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Escalopes of Bass, Budapest
Scrape, wash and wipe two fresh one-and-a-half-pound sea bass, cut off heads, split in two through back, remove spinal bones and cut each half into three slanting, even pieces. Place in a lightly buttered baking dish, skin side downward, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, and squeeze over the juice of a sound lemon. Place in a black frying pan one ounce fresh butter and three tablespoons bread crumbs, shuffle pan on fire until crumbs obtain a nice golden colour, pour it over fish and set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and serve.
A short, deliberately plain baked-fish dish whose only real seasoning is paprika and lemon. The original omits an oven temperature, which is the one gap worth filling before you start.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given. Fifteen minutes for pieces of this thickness suggests a hot oven; something in the 400-425F range is a reasonable modern reading. At a lower temperature the fish will take longer and the crumbs are more likely to soften than to stay crisp.
- "Escalopes" hereNot pounded cutlets. Each boned half fillet is cut on a strong bias into three even pieces, which gives twelve pieces from two fish and a broader surface for the buttered crumbs.
- Buying the fishTwo 1.5 lb whole sea bass, scaled and gutted, yield roughly 1.2 to 1.4 lb of boneless fish. If your fishmonger fillets them for you, keep the skin on, since the recipe lays the pieces skin side downward in the dish.
- A black frying panIn period usage, a heavy iron pan. Whatever the reason for specifying it, iron holds heat evenly while you shuffle the crumbs; they brown fast and scorch soon after, so take them off the heat the moment they are golden.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of sweet Hungarian paprika rather than smoked Spanish pimenton, which is not what this style of cooking called for and will dominate the dish. Fresh paprika matters; old paprika tastes of dust.
- "A sound lemon"Simply an unblemished one. The juice of a whole lemon over 1.5 lb of fish is assertive; if your lemon is large, hold back a little and pass the rest at table.
- DonenessCheck before the full fifteen minutes: the flesh should just separate into flakes at the thickest point. Standard food-safety guidance is 145F at the thickest part. Bass dries out quickly once past done.
- YieldServes four as a main course with potatoes, or six as a first course. Serve straight from the baking dish, since transferring the pieces loses the crumb topping.
The tag "Budapest" on a French-style menu of the early 1900s generally meant paprika, the spice that European cooks had come to identify wholly with Hungary after it took hold in Hungarian cooking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Restaurant kitchens of the period built long lists of garnitures named for cities and patrons, and the convention was that the name told the reader the seasoning or sauce rather than any genuine regional provenance -- this dish is a plain buttered-crumb baked fish, French in method, Hungarian only in its dusting of paprika and a squeeze of lemon. Books like this one, compiled from professional hotel and restaurant practice for American households, carried that naming system into home kitchens, which is why a home cook could find sea bass filed under a Danube capital.