Home › Fish › Fish a La Creole
Fish a La Creole
Pepper and salt a thick piece of cod or haddock, and spread the outside with butter. Lay it on a tin sheet, in a dripping pan, and sprinkle over it four cloves of garlic chopped fine. Cover with a layer of tomatoes, peppered and salted. Cover closely and bake one hour.
A plain baked fish with garlic and tomato, written for a cook who already knew her range. Two things need translating: the oven temperature, which is not given at all, and the hour of baking, which will destroy a modern fillet.
- Cooking time is the hingeA thick piece of cod or haddock is done at an internal 130-140F, which takes 20-30 minutes at 375F for a 2-inch centre-cut piece. The stated hour reflects a covered bake in a range whose heat the cook judged by eye; held that long, a modern piece of cod turns dry and flakes into cotton.
- Oven temperatureNone is specified. A moderate oven, about 350-375F, suits the dish: covered and moderate lets the tomatoes soften into a sauce rather than scorch.
- "A tin sheet, in a dripping pan"A flat sheet of tinned steel set inside a roasting pan, which also makes it easier to lift the cooked fish out whole. A flat baking sheet or a piece of parchment with overhanging edges in a shallow roasting dish does the same work.
- "Cover closely"Probably an inverted pan or a second dripping pan. Foil crimped tightly to the rim is the modern equivalent, and it matters: the fish steams in tomato juice rather than roasting dry.
- Four cloves of garlicFour modern cloves, finely chopped, is assertive but in keeping with the Creole intent; scattered raw on the surface they will brown, so tuck some under the tomatoes.
- TomatoesFresh, peeled and sliced thick is closest to the original. Out of season, drained canned whole tomatoes crushed by hand work better than watery fresh ones, which will flood the pan.
- YieldFigure a 2 to 2.5 lb thick piece for four; the tomato and garlic layer becomes the sauce, so nothing more is needed than rice or bread.
"A la Creole" in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s was shorthand for tomato, onion and pepper, with garlic sometimes added, a formula borrowed loosely from New Orleans cooking and applied to almost anything a Northern kitchen already had on hand. The Twentieth Century Cook Book belongs to the era when regional American names became national recipe labels, usually stripped down to one or two signature ingredients; here the whole Creole apparatus is reduced to garlic and tomatoes on a piece of cod. The garlic is the telling detail, since it is often said to have been regarded with suspicion in mainstream Anglo-American cooking of the period, and its presence marks the dish as deliberately foreign-flavoured. Cod and haddock are named interchangeably because both were cheap, firm and universally available on the Atlantic coast, and either takes a covered bake without falling apart.