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White Perch, St. Gotthard
Trim, scale and neatly wipe six very fresh white perch; season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper and keep on a plate. Slice exceedingly fine four medium, peeled and washed raw potatoes. Season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; turn them well in the seasoning. Lightly butter an enamelled, low-edged, small roasting pan. If not at hand, use a well-cleaned buttered tin. Arrange a layer of potatoes all over the bottom of the pan; sprinkle a half tablespoon grated Swiss cheese over, arrange a few very little bits of butter over, lay another similar layer of potatoes, cheese and butter, and so on until all the potatoes are used. Set in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, arrange the six perch on top of the potatoes, pour half gill white wine over them and set in the oven to bake for twenty-five minutes. Remove, squeeze the juice of half a sound lemon over, spread a teaspoon chopped parsley over all, and send to the table in the same dish.
A gratin of sliced potato with whole fish laid on top to finish, from a book that gives no oven temperature and expects you to know your own range. A few conversions and one timing note are all it needs.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of white wine a scant quarter cup.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book assumes you know your own range. A moderately hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400F, is a reasonable modern reading: hot enough to get the thin potatoes going in the first fifteen minutes and to cook the fish in the second stage without drying it.
- The potatoes are the hinge"Exceedingly fine" means paper-thin, about 1/16 inch, on a mandoline. Thicker slices will still be crunchy when the fish is done, and there is no cream or stock here to rescue them.
- Buy the fish dressedWhite perch (Morone americana) is an Atlantic coast fish, sold whole and small. "Trim, scale and wipe" assumes the fishmonger has gutted them; ask for that. Any small whole panfish of six to eight ounces works the same way.
- Swiss cheeseIn New York at this date this would have meant an Emmental or Gruyere type, whether imported or domestic. Half a tablespoon per layer is deliberately sparse; the cheese is seasoning, not a blanket.
- Twenty-five minutesAbout right for whole perch of this size in a moderately hot oven. The flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone, around 145F at the thickest point. Fillets would need noticeably less time.
- The panA shallow enamelled roasting pan of the period is a low-sided baking dish today. Choose one just large enough to hold the six fish in a single layer without overlapping, since the dish goes to the table as it is.
- YieldSix small perch serve three generously or six as a first course, with the potato layer standing in for a side dish.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book is largely a catalogue of the restaurant repertoire of his day, in which dishes were routinely tagged with a place name that hinted at the garnish. St. Gotthard is the Alpine pass through the Swiss cantons, and the label here does what such names usually did: it announces the Swiss cheese and the layered potatoes rather than any documented Swiss origin. The fish itself is thoroughly American. White perch runs in the brackish rivers and estuaries of the Atlantic seaboard and was a cheap, abundant market fish in New York, so the recipe is a fair picture of how Continental-trained chefs worked in the United States, taking whatever came off the local boats and dressing it in the vocabulary of European cooking.