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Striped Bass with Curry
Cut off head, scale and trim off fins of a three-pound fresh striped bass. Split open through the front without separating, remove spinal bone, lay fish on a buttered baking dish, cut side up. Season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon curry powder and three saltspoons pepper. Pour a gill white wine around the fish. Squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon, sprinkle three tablespoons bread croutons over the fish, place a few little bits butter over the surface. Set in oven to bake thirty-five minutes. Remove and serve.
A plain baked fish with a light curry seasoning, written for a cook who already knows how to bone a bass. The measurements need translating and the timing needs watching.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. It should sit in the dish around the fish rather than over it, so the crumbs stay dry enough to colour.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so three is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. That is a firm hand by modern taste against half a teaspoon of salt; half that amount is more balanced unless you want real heat.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only "set in oven to bake." A moderately hot oven, around 400F, suits a split fish.
- The timingThirty-five minutes will overcook a butterflied three-pound bass. Split flat, it is usually done in 20 to 25 minutes; pull it at 130-135F at the thickest point, or when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone line.
- Bread croutonsHere this means coarse dried breadcrumbs or very small toasted cubes scattered as a topping, not the salad crouton of today. Toss them with a little of the butter first so they brown rather than scorch.
- Buying the fishWild striped bass is regulated by season and size in many US states. Farmed hybrid striped bass, usually sold whole at 2-3 lb, is the practical substitute; two smaller fish work as well as one large.
- Curry powderPeriod curry powder was mild, turmeric-forward and heavy on coriander. A modern hot Madras blend will dominate the wine and lemon; use a mild blend, or cut a hot one with extra turmeric.
- YieldA three-pound whole fish, boned and split, serves three to four.
The International Cook Book belongs to the wave of encyclopaedic professional collections published in the United States in the early twentieth century, assembled by hotel and restaurant chefs and arranged to show the range of a well-travelled kitchen — hence recipes in which an American Atlantic fish is finished with an Anglo-Indian spice blend and French technique in the same paragraph. Ready-mixed curry powder was an English trade product of the 1780s that became common in American pantries rather later, and it was used less as an Indian seasoning than as a general savoury note, which is exactly its role here: half a teaspoon over three pounds of fish, working alongside white wine and lemon rather than replacing them. Striped bass itself was the prestige fish of the northeastern seaboard, and the instruction to split it through the front and lift out the spine — leaving the fish whole and openable at the table — is standard restaurant butchery of the day, set down without explanation because the reader was expected to have done it before.