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Savory Fish Fillets
2 fish fillets about 1½ pounds 1 medium sized green pepper, minced 1 small onion, sliced 1 teaspoon parsley, minced Juice 1/2 lemon 1/4 cup Mazola 3/4 cup coarse white bread crumbs Salt and pepper Brush the fillets with Mazola and place in a pan oiled with it. Dust with salt and pepper, spread the onion, parsley and green pepper over and cover sparingly with the crumbs mixed with the Mazola. Bake fifteen to twenty minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F. and serve plain, with sliced lemon and water cress, Sauce Tartare, Bordelais or Bearnaise Sauce.
A short, clean baked-fish formula from a corn-oil promotional book. It works as written; the only real gaps are a stray ingredient and a temperature the original mislabels.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was and is a refined corn oil, and the book exists largely to sell it. Any neutral oil substitutes one for one, though the crumb topping benefits from melted butter if you are not bound to the brand.
- The oven is moderate, not hotThe text calls 375F a hot oven, though in most cookbooks of the period a hot or quick oven meant something nearer 400-450F, with 375F counted as moderate. Take the number, not the adjective, and bake at 375F.
- The lemon juice has no instructionHalf a lemon's juice is listed but never appears in the method. Sprinkle it over the seasoned fillets before the vegetables go on, or reserve it and squeeze it over at the table.
- Time by thicknessFifteen to twenty minutes suits fillets around an inch thick. Thin flounder or sole fillets will be done in eight to ten; judge by the flesh turning opaque and parting at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- Cover sparingly means sparinglyThree-quarters of a cup of coarse crumbs over one and a half pounds of fish is a thin veil, not a crust. Piling it on traps steam and leaves the topping pale and damp.
- Slice the onion thinRaw sliced onion has only the baking time to soften. Cut it paper-thin or the fish will be ready while the onion is still sharp and crunchy.
- Coarse white bread crumbsThese are torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not the fine dry sand sold in canisters. Panko is the closest supermarket equivalent for texture.
- YieldA pound and a half of fillets serves three at lunch, or two generously with the suggested watercress and lemon.
This comes from one of the corn-products cookbooks that American food manufacturers distributed by the thousand in the first decades of the twentieth century, in which recipes routinely call for the sponsoring brand by name. Mazola, a refined corn oil, was marketed as a modern, neutral, all-purpose fat at a time when lard and butter still dominated the home kitchen, and books like this one worked to persuade cooks that oil could brush, bake and dress as well as fry. The finishing suggestions are pure hotel French of the era: tartare, bordelaise and bearnaise were the sauces a reader would have met on a restaurant menu, and offering them beside a plain baked fillet is the book quietly promising that its economical luncheon dish could hold its own in company.