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Flounder a la Creme
1 flounder about 2 lbs. 2 cupfuls milk 1 tablespoonful cream 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 blade mace 6 whole white peppers 4 tablespoonfuls flour Lemon juice Salt and pepper to taste Skin flounder, and take fillets off neatly by sharply cutting down the middle of back, and pressing the knife close to the bones. This will produce 4 long fillets. Cut each of them in half lengthways, and tie up in pretty knot; sprinkle a little salt over and put them aside. Wash skin, bones of fish, put them into a small saucepan with milk, mace, and whole peppers and simmer for half hour; strain milk into clean saucepan; add fillets, and allow to simmer for ten minutes. Lift them out, and add to milk the Crisco and flour beaten together; stir till it becomes quite smooth; add salt, pepper and lemon juice to taste, and cream; put in fillets gently to warm through; dish neatly and pour the sauce over them. Serve very hot.
A plain flounder in a milk-based velouté, from one of the Crisco promotional books. The technique is sound; only the timings and the shortening need attention.
- The hinge: don't simmer the fillets ten minutesThin flounder fillets, even knotted, are cooked through in 3 to 4 minutes in barely trembling milk. Ten minutes will leave them shredded and dry, and they get another warm-through in the finished sauce afterwards.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so it turns up in recipe after recipe, including this one. Butter is the better choice for a white fish sauce and will give it flavour the shortening cannot; use 3 tablespoons either way.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one piece of that aril, roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace. Ground mace will speck the sauce and cannot be strained out, so use whole blade if you want the sauce clean.
- Whole white peppersWhite peppercorns, used so no black flecks show in a white sauce. Six is a light hand; they infuse rather than season, and the final seasoning is done separately at the end.
- The milk infusion is the stockSimmering skin and bones in milk for half an hour is what gives the sauce its flavour, so do not skip it and do not let the milk boil, or it will catch and taste scorched. Strain through a fine sieve; a scald-free double boiler is easier if your pan is thin.
- Beaten flour and fatFour tablespoons flour worked cold into 3 tablespoons fat, the beurre manie method (though with shortening rather than butter), whisked into the hot liquid in small pieces rather than cooked as a roux first. That much flour to 2 cups milk gives a thick coating sauce; cut it to 3 tablespoons if you want it looser, and let it simmer two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Knotting the filletsHalve each fillet lengthways into strips, then tie each in a loose single knot. Salt them and rest a few minutes as directed; the strips firm up and hold their shape in the poaching liquid.
- YieldA 2 lb flounder yields something like three-quarters of a pound of fillet, which serves two generously or three as a first course. Serve very hot, as the sauce sets quickly as it cools.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which introduced Crisco in 1911 and published a series of cookbooks to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard everywhere — hence its unlikely appearance in a delicate cream sauce for flounder. The dish itself reads as what might broadly be called the hotel and boarding-house French of the period: fillets poached in a milk infused with the fish trimmings, then bound with flour and fat, the same logic as a sauce vin blanc but with milk in place of stock and wine. Knotting or curling flat-fish fillets before poaching is often said to have been common restaurant presentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a way to give a thin, floppy piece of fish some height on the plate. The whole white peppercorns and single blade of mace are the older English seasoning for anything served white, chosen as much for the absence of visible specks as for flavour.