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Red Mullet
Rougets en caisse are broiled in papers, sprinkled with chopped parsley and oil. en papillotes are baked in papers and served with Italian sauce. Served with white Ravigote sauce, they are called à la Ravigote. aux fines herbes-cooked with butter, wine, Harvey sauce and anchovy. Served in the sauce with chopped mushrooms, parsley, shallot, and lemon juice. sauce verte-served with green sauce. à la Claudine-served in a brown sauce with anchovies, mushrooms and capers. à la Metropole-stewed in white wine with herbs, and served in the sauce thickened with butter and flour. à la maître d'hôtel-served in Maître d'hôtel They are dressed in this way in sauce. fillets.
Filets de rougets à la Montesquieu. Fillets cut in halves, sauté in butter with wine, lemon juice, etc., and served in the sauce with melted butter and milk.
Red mullet, cooked whole in paper or taken off the bone, with a run of sauces that lean Mediterranean: anchovy, capers, olives, oil, white wine. Two things on the page have to be translated before a modern cook can use it.
- Harvey sauceA bottled sauce of the period built on anchovy, vinegar and soy, used by the spoonful the way we use Worcestershire sauce. It is not on sale now. Worcestershire in the same quantity is the nearest thing and the dish does not suffer for the swap.
- Anchovy is working as saltA fillet laid on, or essence stirred in, for depth rather than for a fish flavour. In à la Claudine the anchovies sit with mushrooms and capers in a brown sauce and are the salt of it. Anchovy paste, or a salted fillet mashed with the back of a knife, does the job.
- Buying red mulletSold small, and two to a person. A French fishmonger calls it rouget. It is traditionally cooked without being gutted, for the sake of the liver, which is part of why so much of this page cooks the fish whole in paper. Decide that before you ask for it cleaned.
- Paper, twice overEn caisse is broiled in paper, en papillotes baked in it. The difference is only the direction of the heat, and in a modern oven the two collapse into one method. Butter the paper heavily, because this fish carries little fat of its own.
- Montesquieu is a pan sauceFillets halved, sautéed, the pan deglazed with wine and lemon, the sauce finished with butter and milk. It takes two minutes and it is the one entry on the page a cook can follow exactly as written.
À la Metropole is a hotel’s name sitting on a domestic menu. It only works as a dish name if the reader has heard of the hotel and wants the association, and the page sets it down beside à la Claudine and à la Montesquieu without a word of comment. What the list records is a household looking outward for its standards: not to a family receipt book, but to the public dining rooms where the fashionable version of a fish was being settled.