Julia Child’s Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons (Fish Filets Poached in White Wine with Mushrooms)

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baked fish, filets de poisson bercy aux champignons, fish with mushrooms, fish with white wine sauce, julia child fish recipes, Julia Child recipes, poached fish

Julia Child’s Fish Poached in White Wine Sauce

It’s been too long since I’ve done any Julia Child recipes. I had a few hours on a Sunday afternoon and a desire to cook up some fish that we brought back from our vacation to the Outer Banks. The filets were tilefish–meaty and mild, and they were well-protected in their freezer wrap but still, after a few months, you need to dress them up a bit.

Julia, with her penchant for wine, butter, and cheese, had just the solution. This was a relatively easy dinner from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and was just fancy enough to be special without being too pretentious.

Ingredients

12 ounces of fresh white mushrooms, cleaned, patted dry and sliced
5 tablespoons butter, divided
1/8 teaspoon salt
Pinch of pepper
2 1/2 pounds filet of sole, flounder, or tilefish
2 tablespoons finely minced shallots or green onions
1/2 cup water
1 cup white wine
2 1/2 tablespoons flour
3/4 cup milk or heavy cream
1/4 cup grated cheese

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a skillet. Toss the mushrooms in the butter over moderately high heat for a minute or two without browning. Season with a bit of salt and pepper and set aside.

Sprinkle half the onions along the bottom of a buttered dish that can be used on both the stovetop and oven (I have a cast-iron dutch oven). Season the filets with the salt and pepper and lay them across the onions in one slightly overlapping layer. Sprinkle the remaining onions or shallots over the fish, then add the mushrooms, and finally the water and white wine. Bring the dish to simmer on the stove.

Spray a piece of parchment cut to size on one side and lay it over the fish.
Place the dish into the oven and cook until just barely done, 8-12 minutes, depending on the thickness of the filets. You’ll know it’s ready when a fork can easily pierce the skin of the fish but don’t let it get dry and flaky. Take the dish out and drain all the cooking liquid into a saucepan. Set the fish, still inside the dutch oven, aside, covered.

Preheat the oven’s broiler. Meanwhile, bring the cooking liquid to a rapid boil and boil it down until it has reduced to one cup. Take it off the heat. Meanwhile, soften the remaining three tablespoons of butter and beat it into the flour to form a paste. Beat that paste into the boiling, reduced cooking liquid, then mix in 1/2 cup of milk or cream. Bring that mixture to a boil. Thin the sauce with additional tabelspoons of milk or cream until it coats the spoon nicely. Season to taste and spoon it over the fish.

Cover the fish with the cheese. Place the whole cooking dish back until the oven, under the broiler for 2-3 minutes, just long enough to melt the cheese and reheat the fish. Serve as soon as possible.

Enjoy!

Downton Abbey Salmon Squares with Dill Mayonnaise

Tags

downton abbey, main dishes, salmon, seafood, Sunday supper, vintage recipes

My life is complete again. Downton Abbey, Season Three, is now airing on PBS and I find myself anxiously counting the days until Sunday when I can get my next fix.

Like most Downton fans, I am deeply invested in the characters. Will Lady Mary and Matthew find everlasting happiness? Will Branson be accepted into the family? Will the Dowager Countess and Mrs. Crawley ever agree on anything? Will Lady Edith be anything more than the Marcia Brady of Edwardian-era England? I tune in each week, longing to know the answers to these questions but also for the exquisite costumes, the GORGEOUS estate, and…. the food.  I’ll admit it. When a dining or kitchen scene is shown, I barely pay attention to the dialogue. My eyes dart through the room for glimpses of the cookware, the serving dishes, the stove, and the pantry. What’s on the sideboard? How are the dishes prepared and presented? This is where my attention is focused. Sorry, Downton writers.

The servants of Downton have their own communal table where they have meals after the family has been served.

On premiere day, I needed something to keep myself occupied or I knew the hours would drag until 9 p.m. So, I made Downton-era food… four recipes, which I’ll be sharing over the course of the next two weekends.

Fruitcake, anyone?

As we enter Season Three, Downton’s plotline has moved into 1920. I admit, I’m not a fan of this decade. The dresses are formless, the hair is shorn and bobbed, and all I know of 1920’s era food is what I’ve learned from reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, with his description of tomato sandwiches, salad and gin. It always seemed to me that the 1920’s were an era of light food and heavy drinking.

But the 1920’s America of Fitzgerald’s depiction is different than the England of the 1920’s. The people of Great Britain are rebuilding after World War One and the old money families are struggling to maintain their way of life and traditions in a new age where class and upbringing are beginning to be of less importance.

Mrs. Patmore, Daisy, and new footman Alfred.

I went looking for recipes mainly from the 1920’s to share with you. Three of these come from my fabulous Christmas present cookbook, “Heirloom Cooking with the Brass Sisters.” Marilynn and Sheila Brass are collectors of vintage recipes, both in book form and handwritten, and they date each recipe by decade. The fourth recipe is from the Downton Abbey Cooks blog, which I highly recommend to fellow Downton-lovers.  And for a fabulous article about that blog’s author and the food, the kitchen, and dining room of Downton-real and fictional-click here!

We begin with Salmon Squares. I picked this because it sounded delicious-and also because I imagined it would be a luncheon request of Countess Grantham’s American mother, played by Shirley Maclaine. It’s sophisticated, rich, and presents beautifully. I suggest it for your next Sunday dinner. It is labor intensive-but well worth the effort! It makes nine servings.

Countess Grantham’s mother, played by Shirley MacClaine.

Ingredients
• 2 cups fine bread crumbs (see note)
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1 cup cooked rice
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 14.75 ounce canned salmon
• ¼ cup chopped onion
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted, divided
• 4 ½ tablespoons finely chopped dill, divided
• 1 tablespoon parsley
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
• ¼ teaspoon paprika
• 10 Ritz crackers, crushed
• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice
• ½ teaspoon sugar

Instructions

Set the oven rack in the middle position. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Coat a 2 quart, 8×11 inch ovenproof glass baking dish with cooking spray. You’ll also need another pan in which to set the baking dish to create a water bath-I used a glass 9×12 inch pan. Set a kettle of water on to boil.

Note: To make fine bread crumbs, toast six slices of bread. Bread into bits and process in a blender, one slice at a time, set on “grind.”
Place bread crumbs in large bowl. Put milk in a microwaveable mug and heat in microwave for about a minute and 15 seconds, until hot but not boiling. Pour hot milk over bread crumbs. Add egg yolks, mix, and set aside.

Bread crumbs, milk and egg yolks

In a medium size bowl, combine rice, cream, salmon, onion, 4 tablespoons of the melted butter, 1 ½ tablespoons of the dill, parsley, salt, pepper and paprika. Add to the bread crumb mixture and stir to combine.

The cream, salmon and dill step. Anytime there is cream in a recipe, you know it’s going to be good.

Beat egg whites with mixer until soft peaks form. Fold egg whites into salmon mixture and transfer to prepared 8×11 baking dish. Mix the remaining 2 tablespoons melted butter with cracker crumbs and sprinkle over top.

Place 8×11 dish into the larger dish. Pour boiling water into the larger dish until it comes about halfway up the sides of the 8×11 inch dish. Cover the entire thing with foil and place carefully into oven.

This was difficult to illustrate but you can see the 8×11 pan inside the 9×13 pan, which is half filled with water. So basically, you bake and steam your salmon.

Bake 30 minutes. The recipe says to check the water periodically to make sure it doesn’t evaporate. I didn’t see any water evaporation at all but I use an electric oven and in a gas oven, the water may evaporate-so keep an eye on it. Replenish as needed.

After 30 minutes, remove the foil and bake an additional 30 minutes or until a tester inserted into salmon comes out clean. Remove from oven and the water bath and let the dish cook for about 10 minutes before serving.

Meanwhile, mix the mayonnaise, three tablespoons of the dill, lemon juice, and sugar in a bowl. Cut the salmon into squares and serve with a dollop of the dill mayonnaise. Enjoy!

The salmon squares with the dill mayo, and a little carrots on the side for color.

Colonial Williamsburg’s Seafood Gumbo

Tags

colonial williamsburg, heritage recipes, historical food, soup, vintage recipes

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good home garden harvest. To see all the time and energy you’ve put into planting, fertilizing, watering, and fending off deer, squirrels, insects and disease finally come to fruition is one of the great joys of life!

The Saturday afternoon harvest that made me hungry for gumbo!

But for our ancestors, gardening wasn’t so much a hobby as a necessity of life. And summer harvests of fresh vegetables were a joy for different reasons-they brought tastes and nutrients into their kitchen that we, in the age of 24-hour super-grocery markets, take for granted.

I’m from the north, but I grow okra. It’s surprisingly easy-much like a weed, it grows tall and strong no matter how hot or dry it gets. It’s prolific. And you can use the pods in lots of ways (fried!). But the best known is in gumbo!

The Williamsburg Cookbook, from Colonial Williamsburg, says gumbo is the Negro expression for the okra plant. The soup is distinctly American, originating in Louisiana, where it was thickened and flavored by the okra (who know okra was a thickening agent?) and by something called File’ powder, which is the ground leaves of the Sassafras plant. It’s one of my favorite soups-but I’ve never tried to make it myself-until now!

The original version of this recipe also contains ½ cup scallops and ½ cup oysters, which I omitted because I didn’t have any in the house.

Ingredients
• 1 pound raw shrimp, shell-on
• 1 stalk celery plus 1 cup celery tops
• ½ medium onion, diced
• 1 medium green pepper, diced
• 1 clove garlic, diced
• 4 tablespoons butter, divided
• 2 cups canned tomatoes or two fresh beefsteak tomatoes, cut into chunks
• ½ cup tomato paste
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 5 slender pods of okra, about 4-5 inches long, sliced
• Dash Tabasco sauce
• ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• Bay leaf
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 ½ teaspoons gumbo file powder (you can substitute with another pod of okra if you don’t have the file powder)
• ½ cup crabmeat
• 1 cup cooked rice

Instructions

Peel shrimp, saving hulls. Put hulls and celery tops in a large soup pot with 2 quarts water. Boil for 30 minutes. Strain. (the broth will be green!) Set aside broth and stock pot.

Boiling celery leaves and shrimp hulls make up the stock

Sauté celery, onions, green pepper and garlic in 2 tablespoons of the butter until tender but not brown.

The veggies in butter for the saute

Transfer sautéed veggies into the stock pot. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, and one quart of the stock to the veggies. Let simmer for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, put the remaining stock into a smaller saucepan. Bring to a boil and blanch the okra for 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.
Make a roux by melting the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and stirring in the flour. Mix thoroughly and cook 3 minutes over low-medium heat but do not brown.

The roux on the heat. There’s a piece that looks red because I was using the same wooden spoon to stir the stock and make the roux!

Wisk roux into stock and cook for 5 minutes.
Dice the shrimp. Add the shrimp, okra, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, bay leaf, and salt to stock and simmer for 20 minutes (if you are using scallops, you’ll also add them at this point). Remove bay leaf.

The shrimp has been added, along with the spices-we’re nearly done!

If you are using file powder, take ½ cup of the stock and sprinkle the powder over it. Beat until smooth. Add back to stock and simmer five minutes but be careful NOT to let it boil. It will become stringy and unfit to serve.
Remove the pot from heat and add rice, crabmeat and oysters, if you’re using them.

The finished gumbo!

Hungry yet?

Enjoy!

Curried Fish

Tags

easy weeknight meals, fish, food, heritage recipes, historical food, main dishes, old recipes, quick meals, vintage recipes

More than six months ago, I began this hobby of researching and cooking vintage recipes in earnest. This is the very first recipe I tried.

Curried fish dates to late 18th century England. This recipe is from “The Virginia Housewife”, written by Mary Randolph, and published in 1838. Randolph, by the way, was the first person to be buried at Arlington. Her cookbook includes recipes from all over the world.

As I’ve said before, curry was a popular spice in the vintage kitchen. The nice thing about this recipe is that you can use almost any type of white fish-whiting, tilapia, cod, perch… they all work! Randolph like to use catfish. Here is the original recipe:

Take the white channel catfish, cut off their heads, skins and clean them, cut them in pieces four inches long, put as many as will be sufficient for a dish into a stew pan with a quart of water, two onions, and chopped parsley; let them stew gently till the water is reduced to half a pint, take the fish out and lay them on a dish, cover them to keep them hot, rub a spoonful of butter into one of flour, add a large tea-spoonful of curry powder, thicken the gravy with it, and pour it over the fish; be careful to have the gravy smooth.

One note of caution: this recipe only makes about three servings, so be sure to double it if you are feeding more people. Here is the modern version:

Ingredients
• 1 pound of boneless fish, cut into chunks
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• Two handfuls of fresh parsley roughly chopped or one handful of dried parsley
• Three cups of water or chicken broth
• One to two tablespoons of curry powder, depending on your preference
• Four tablespoons of butter or olive oil, divided
• Three tablespoons of flour
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Put half the butter or oil into a pot and sauté the onions and parsley until the onions are translucent. Season with salt and pepper.
Add the fish and the broth or water. Bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, about 10-12 minutes, until fish is cooked.
Using a slotted spoon, remove the fish (you’ll get a lot of the onions too, and that’s okay) and place into covered dish. Set aside.

Bring the remaining liquid back to a boil and cook about 15 minutes, reducing the liquid as much as possible.
In a small bowl, make a roux with the rest of the butter or oil and flour. If you use butter, melt it first. Whisk the two together until the mixture is golden and smooth, about two minutes. Add the curry powder and mix thoroughly.

Add the curry and butter mixture to the hot liquid and bring it all up to a boil again. Stir until thickened. Take the gravy off the heat and stir the fish back in. Cover and let the flavors combine for a few minutes. Serve over rice.

My daughter’s love this dish for dinner-but of course, they’re fans of curry. It’s an easy and inexpensive dish and low in calories. Enjoy!