Broiled Pompano
This is a southern fish and very delicate.
Broil in the usual way. Serve with cucumbers or green salad.
The instruction "broil in the usual way" assumed a reader who already knew her fish cookery; here is what that phrase covered in a book of this vintage.
- "Broil" then and nowIn 1911 broiling meant a hinged wire broiler held over live coals or set in front of an open fire, cooking both sides by radiant heat. The nearest modern equivalent is a very hot grill pan, a charcoal grill, or an oven broiler with the rack set 3-4 inches below the element.
- The fish itselfPompano is still sold, mostly from Florida and the Gulf, usually whole at 1 1/2 to 2 lb or as skin-on fillets. One whole fish serves one or two; allow about 1/2 lb of dressed fish per person. Florida pompano is not the same as the larger permit or the African pompano, though either can be cooked the same way.
- Splitting rather than filletingFor a small flat-sided fish the common broiling preparation was to split it down the back, leaving it in one piece, and lay it out flat so it cooked in a few minutes. Fillets work too, but the skin-on split fish holds together far better under high heat.
- TimePompano is thin and rich. Four to five minutes a side for a split whole fish, two to three minutes for a fillet, skin side first. It is done when the flesh just parts at the backbone; the flesh dries out quickly past that point.
- Fat and seasoningThe recipe says nothing about fat or seasoning, but a hinged broiler and the fish itself would have been greased before going over the coals. Brush with melted butter or oil, season with salt and pepper, and finish with lemon; the flesh is oily enough that it needs little else.
- The accompaniment"Cucumbers" here most likely means sliced cucumbers dressed with vinegar, oil, salt and pepper and served cold, rather than a cooked vegetable. It is there to cut the richness of the fish.
Pompano was a luxury fish of the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, prized in New Orleans above almost anything else that came out of the Gulf, and the city's restaurants built showpieces around it, most famously pompano baked in a paper case. Butterick, a New York pattern company publishing for a nationwide readership of home sewers and housekeepers, includes it in a fish chapter that runs through dozens of species with the brevity of a reference list: the point is not to teach broiling but to tell a cook in Ohio what to do with an unfamiliar fish if she ever met one. The near-total absence of instruction is itself informative about the period, when a general cookbook could assume the reader had already mastered a hinged broiler and needed only to be told which sauce or salad belonged beside the fish. Pompano remains a commercially fished species in the Gulf and South Atlantic and is still treated the same way, plainly grilled with lemon.