Fillets Elegante
2001-12-05 @ 1:51 p.m.
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When Badsnake and I moved into the house we now own (or at least own a portion of - the doorknobs and window sills) the first thing I had to do was move out the elderly woman from whom we bought the house. Sarah (note the different spelling from the girlfriend) had lived here for many, many years, first with her husband and then, after he died, with her mother. When we bought the house Sarah was living here alone and just barely in possession of her faculties. Jake and Sara (girlfriends) had already bought the house next door. Bad and I were shopping for a house in the neighborhood when Sarah announced that she was going to sell her's. I immediately told her we wanted to buy it without having seen the inside. It is a great house. We negotiated the sale and moved in. (We did get to look at it first.)
One thing I promised Sarah, however, was that she could leave anything here that she didn't want to take with her. Her niece and nephew got some of her stuff, and Sarah took some stuff with her. But she was moving into a small (very small) one bedroom apartment in a high rise for older folks. So she left a lot behind. I took a week off from work to pack up her stuff (for a spring yard sale - we moved in in January), clean the house and begin moving our stuff in. The sale of the house was final on December 28 and the four of us had a New Year's Day dinner of black-eyed peas, collard greens and pork roast (supposed to bring good luck in the coming year) on a table of boxes covered with a sheet for a table cloth. I think that might have been my first home cooking in the new house.
We inherited several things from Sarah. We are still using some old furniture she left behind, and we are still living with a couple of rooms of pink flowered wallpaper stained by years of cigarette smoke. (Sarah was quite the smoker. Jake and Sara said she used to mow her own lawn in high heels with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth.) I also inherited some cool kitchen stuff. She left a cast iron corn stick pan, in particular, and a couple of recipe clippings file notebooks with tons of recipes in them. One of my first projects after we moved in was to sort through them and see if there were recipes I wanted to keep. I found some fun stuff, including two different recipe pamphlets published by Knox Gelatine. One is copyright 1929; the other is from 1960. On the inside cover of the one from 1929 is a very nice letter from the "Office of Mrs. Charles B. Knox, President" on the importance of gelatin in the diet.
Also stashed in the clippings files was a typed page (8 1/2" by 14"), yellowing and stained, with seven recipes on it and the heading "Favorite Recipes From Sarah." I imagine that she had copies of this made to give out to friends. So I tried one Sunday. Well, okay, I fiddled with it some. Here is Sarah's recipe for "Fillets Elegante."
1 lb pkg frozen fish fillets
2 tbsp margarine
1 can condensed cream of shrimp soup (thawed if frozen)
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
Thaw fillets (sole, haddock, halibut or cod) enough to separate. Arrange in buttered 9" pie plate. Dash with pepper; dot with butter. Spread soup over fillets and sprinkle with parmesan cheese and paprika. Bake in hot oven (400 degrees) for 25 minutes. Serve with lemon wedges. Makes 4 servings.
I used four fillets of fresh tilapia (Publix had it on special) instead of frozen fish. I coated the baking pan with cooking spray instead of margarine and added some soy sauce to the fish. Then I spread cream of celery soup, mixed with a little lemon pepper powder, (that sounded better to me) over the fillets. I forgot to put the parmesan and paprika on before I put it in the oven, so at the last minute I added the cheese and paprika and turned on the broiler. Just a couple of minutes under the broiler gives the cheese a slightly crispy top. I served the dish with rice and green beans. The fish casserole was actually quite good and I can see how the soup would jazz up the flavor of frozen fish back in a time when that's probably the only kind of fish she had access to.
Wine: We had an unwooded Chardonnay with it that worked out well. A Sauvignon Blanc would have probably been even better.
Now, this recipe got me all interested in creamed soup casseroles. So I tried another one (my own recipe) last night. More on that in my next entry.
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