LECTURE THIRD.
Our lesson this morning is the clarifying of soup, or the soup stock that we made yesterday; caramel for coloring soup, gravy and sauces; baked whitefish, after a very nice Western fashion; beefsteak, broiled and fried; and baked apple dumplings.
The first thing I prepare will be the whitefish, after a method which I learned from one of my Cleveland friends, who, by the way, is one of the nicest cooks I know of. I shall use only a little butter, and tell you about the wine which the recipe calls for. When the fish is prepared especially for gentlemen, wine is considered exceedingly nice, but that, as in all other cookery, is a matter of choice. We to-day will use some butter, pepper and salt. I will tell you the kind of wine, and the quantity that is used, when I come to cook the fish. In the winter, of course, all the fish is frozen. We were speaking of that yesterday, how to prepare frozen fish. In the first place, thaw it in plenty of cold water. Put it in a large pan of cold water and let it stay till it is perfectly thawed. Then cut it from the bone and take off the skin. Now, please write down the directions, and then watch and see how I do it. The fish simply has been scaled; to cut it from the bone, make one cut down to the bone through the middle of the side of the fish, lengthwise; having made that line, cut round under the head, to the bone; now lay the knife against the bone of the fish, and turn it until you have the blade cutting against the bone, holding the knife flat; it will take that entire piece of the fish off; cut two pieces from one side of the fish. Now I am going to cut from the other side in the same way, and then I shall take the skin off. First take the four pieces of fish off the bone; you will not find this at all difficult to do, ladies; after you have done it once or twice it will be very easy, and if you have fish that has not been frozen it will be much more easy to do than if you have frozen fish, which, of course, will break a little. It is not possible to keep the pieces entire, cutting from a frozen fish. One of the ladies asks if this can be done as well if the fish has been dressed by the fishmonger; that is, if the entrails have been taken out. Yes, quite as well. This is not dressed simply because it had been sent from market without being dressed. I did not take the trouble to have it dressed here, as I am not going to use the bone of the fish. After I have finished giving you the direction for taking off the skin, I am going to tell you how you could use the bone of the fish. To cut the skin off the fish, lay the pieces of fish skin down on the board; then, holding the knife down straight, cut through the fish until you feel the skin under the knife; as soon as you feel the skin under the knife, flatten the knife out so that it lies against the skin; cut away from you, holding the knife perfectly level, leaving the skin between the board and the knife. Hold the piece of fish in your fingers; lay it flat on the board, skin down, keeping hold of the skin all the time. That takes the skin off, and none of the fish; there is no waste there, and it certainly is very much easier to eat fish in this shape than it is if you have the skin and bone on it. Now, I assure you, ladies, if you only hold the knife flat, you will have no trouble whatever in taking the skin off. If you slant it you will cut through the skin of the fish, but if you hold it perfectly flat you will have no trouble. Of course, with certain kinds of fish there are bones that run transversely from the spine out through the sides of the fish. You do not take these bones out by this operation, but you take out the large back bone. It comes out every time, and I assure you it is a very easy operation.
After you have taken all the skin and bones from the fish, then, for this special dish, cut it in small slices three inches long and a couple of inches wide. Use two soup plates, or two dishes of the same size, deep dishes that you can send to the table. Butter them very thickly, both of them. Lay the fish in one of the dishes, season the layers with salt and pepper, and put a very little butter between each layer, and plenty of butter on the top. Turn the second plate over the first one, upside down on it. Put the dishes with the fish between them into the oven to bake for about twenty minutes, or until the fish flakes. You can tell about that by opening the oven at the end of twenty minutes, and lifting off the top plate; then you can see whether the fish is done or not. Now, in the recipe of which I spoke to you first, the addition of Sauterne wine is made. After the fish is put into the dish, being seasoned as I have told you, using less butter than you would without the wine, with half as much butter on the layers, pour on Sauterne wine,—that is a light, rather acid wine,—just enough to moisten the fish. In placing the fish into the dish it does not make any difference which side you put down. You simply want to put the pieces nicely together so that when you come to help them you can lift each piece out with a spoon. There is no acid that will take the place of the wine and give the same taste. The fish is very nice cooked simply with the butter, pepper and salt. You do not need the wine to make a nice dish, only wine is used by the lady of whom I speak. That is her special preparation of the dish. The wine is put in after the fish is in the dish, just enough wine to moisten it. You will notice that often I will make dishes that have no wine in them; if I make dishes that require wine, I of course put it in, saying that you may use the wine or not, as you please. In this instance I use butter, pepper and salt because it makes a very nice dish, a very nice plain dish, but it is a distinct dish, entirely different to the dish cooked with wine; simply two ways of cooking fish, making two different dishes. For a fish of this size—which probably weighed nearly three pounds—you may use about a heaping tablespoonful of butter in all; that is, besides what you put on the plates. You will butter the plates, and distribute butter throughout the dish. The oven should be moderately hot, not hot enough to brown it—hot enough to heat the plates, which are very thick, and to cook the fish within twenty or twenty-five minutes.
If you wash the board on which the fish is cut, at once, in plenty of hot water, with soap and a little soda or borax all the odor of the fish will be removed. Don’t let any of the utensils stand with the fish drying on them, because if you do it will be very much harder to destroy the odor. And, by the way, ladies, the odor of onions is another thing that troubles some persons. The odor of onions on boards, knives and dishes you can do away with entirely by using parsley. If you take a knife with which you have cut onions, and chop a little parsley with it, or draw the knife through the root of parsley two or three times, it entirely destroys the odor of the onion. So that you see you never need have any trouble in that way in the kitchen.
One of the ladies asks me how to prevent the odor of onions going through the house when you are cooking them. What makes onions, cabbage and turnips smell when you are cooking them is the escape of an exceedingly volatile oil which they all contain; in all of them it has the same characteristics; it does not begin to escape until they are tender. The oil does not begin to escape until the vegetables are tender; if you continue to boil them after that, it will escape. If you take up cabbage or turnips as soon as they are tender, that is, as soon as their substance begins to grow tender, you will notice there will be comparatively little odor; but if you keep on boiling them, according to the old-fashioned rules, for an hour, two hours, or three hours,—you know you sometimes boil cabbage all day long,—you will be sure to have a nice odor through the house. In cutting the onions, of course, if you bend over them, that same oil rising from them escapes as you cut into their substance, and will be sure to make you cry; but if you hold them a little away from you in peeling them, or under water, or if you stand where there is a draught blowing over your hands, it will blow that oil away. In eating onions at the table, if you will subsequently eat parsley dipped in vinegar, you will find that there will be very little odor of the onion remaining in the breath.
Now to return to our fish. After you have taken the flesh of the fish off the bone, you still would see a little of the fish remaining, even if you cut closely. Then draw the fish, and trim the bone; that is, cut off the head, and the fins, and the tail, and take out the entrails of the fish; then make a paste of dry mustard, salt, and a dust of Cayenne pepper. For a bone the size we have here, a long bone like that, use two heaping tablespoonfuls of mustard, a dust of Cayenne pepper and enough vinegar, or Worcestershire sauce, to moisten the mustard to make a paste, which is to be spread over the fishbone. Have the double wire gridiron very thickly buttered, put the bone into the gridiron, brown it quickly at a hot fire, and serve it simply as a relish. A sort of Barmecide feast, but I assure you it is very nice with bread or crackers and butter. It makes a very nice little relish. I might say, ladies, that you can treat any kind of bones in this way. Cold roast beef bones are exceedingly nice. Of course there will be more flesh on the beef bones than on the fish bones.