Jewish-Style Sweet and Sour Fish

Jewish-Style Sweet and Sour Fish has been served on Friday nights, for … almost forever.

In 1485, the medieval chef, Taillevent recorded a recipe in Le Viandier for an Alsatian Shabbat fish in sweet-and-sour cameline sauce. The sauce included cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, galangal, saffron, anise, grains of paradise, pepper, mastic, sugar, vinegar, wine, and sometimes raisins. Using spices that had to be collected from around the world made this a very special dish, indeed.

But, it’s not very involved to prepare it, and since it’s served at room temperature, you can, and should, make it in advance.

 Here's my slightly updated version of that original recipe. It has more ingredients than you’ll find in most recipes for Jewish Sweet and Sour Fish, which means you’ll have to pull a few more jars out of the spice cabinet, but adding more spices means the dish will have more flavor. I’m leaving out the mastic, a natural resin that oozes from the trunk and branches of the mastic tree, but including all the other spices. If you can’t get hold of grains of paradise (increase the black pepper and add a pinch of cardamom) or galangal (increase the ginger) you can leave them out, but you lose a flavor dimension if you do. They’re both available at Amazon.

The recipe adds a technique that may be new to you (or maybe not), but it’s not difficult and only takes a few minutes. We’re going to make a caramel to form the base of the sauce—that’s where the term cameline sauce comes from. It adds a very pretty color, as well as flavor, to the sauce, which is fabulous.

I hope you enjoy this historic dish as much as I do.

Feel free to adjust the spices to your personal taste—a bit more of this, a bit less of that—make it your own!

Ingredients:

• 3 lbs fish—pretty much any thick piece of fish will do, such as salmon, cod, grouper, haddock, halibut, sea bass, or sea bream.

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 medium onion, peeled and thinly sliced in half-moons or rings, it’s your choice

• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

• 1 cup sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• ¼—1/2 cup cider vinegar (start with a quarter and add more according to the sweet/sour balance that tastes good to you)

• ¼ teaspoon ground ginger and ¼ teaspoon ground galangal, or ½ teaspoon ground ginger (they’re related)

• 1/8-1/4 teaspoon grains of paradise

• ¼ teaspoon crumbled saffron threads

• ¼ teaspoon fennel seed

• ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (so much better than the pre-ground stuff!) This microplane makes it happen in seconds.

• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

• 6 bay leaves

• 1/2 cup golden raisins

Method:

• Slice the fish into individual portions. For an appetizer, 3 ounces each is a good size.

• Heat the olive oil in a large pot. If you have one with a glass cover, use it. Sauté the onion, with a pinch of salt, until it’s translucent.

• Have a small pastry or basting brush, and a small bowl of water, at the ready

• In a small saucepan or skillet, stir the sugar and 2 tablespoons of water over medium/low heat, until the sugar is dissolved. Continue to stir, constantly, until the sugar begins to boil.

• Then stop stirring—it’s important that you do not stir the caramel at this point— and carefully rotate the pan over the heat until it turns golden-brown color.If any crystals form along the side of the pan, brush them down gently with the brush dipped in water.

• As soon as the color is achieved, remove the pot from the heat and pour the caramel over the onion. If you don’t do it quickly, the caramel will continue to cook in the hot pan and it will burn.

• Next, pour 2 cups of water over the caramel and onion and bring it to a boil. Stir in all the spices, plus the vinegar and raisins.

• Add the fish in a single layer, cover the pot, and simmer over very low heat until the fish is barely cooked through. A good rule of thumb is about 15 minutes. Some fish cook more quickly than others, so keep a careful eye. Also, some fish taste better when cooked all the way through, while some others, such as salmon, are best eaten medium or medium-rare.

• Allow the fish to cool for 15-20 minutes before carefully removing the portions to a serving platter.

• Bring the sauce back to a boil and continue to boil it until it’s been reduced by half.

• Then, pour the sauce over the fish, allow it to cool, and refrigerate until it’s chilled. It can stay in the fridge for a couple of days before serving; in fact, this will only increase the flavor.

• Serve the fish at room temperature.