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Sheepshead, Drawn Butter Sauce
Clean a mediumsized fish thoroughly, rub a little salt over it, wrap in a cloth and lay in a steamer. Boil whole in fish kettle for one hour. Lay it whole on a platter and garnish with parsley sprigs and lemon slices. Serve with the following sauce: Roll two ounces of butter into small balls and dredge them with flour; put one-fourth of them into a saucepan, and, as they begin to melt, whisk them; add the remainder one at a time until thoroughly smooth; and, while stirring mix in one tablespoon of lemon juice, and one-half tablespoon of chopped parsley.
A plain boiled-fish supper from the era when whole fish came to table intact. Two things in the original need attention before anything else: the cooking time, and the fact that the sauce as written is essentially thickened melted butter with no liquid in it.
- One hour is far too longA whole fish is done when the flesh at the thickest point flakes from the bone and reads about 140F. For a medium sheepshead of 3-4 lb that is roughly 25-35 minutes steamed, not an hour. The old timing produced the dry, cottony fish that plain boiled fish is remembered for.
- Steamed, not boiledThe instruction reads as a contradiction but is not. The wrapped fish sits on the rack of a fish kettle above simmering water, so "boil in the fish kettle" means the water boils, not the fish. Keep the water at a bare simmer and the lid on.
- The clothWrapping in a doubled square of cheesecloth, ends left long, is what lets you lift a cooked whole fish onto the platter without it collapsing. It is the most useful sentence in the recipe and worth keeping.
- Fish kettle substituteA long lidded roasting pan with a rack, covered tightly with foil, does the same job. So does a large deep skillet if the fish is small enough to curve into it.
- SheepsheadArchosargus probatocephalus, the black-and-white-barred Atlantic and Gulf fish with the notoriously human-looking teeth. It is firm and sweet and holds together well when steamed. Black sea bass, porgy, striped bass or a whole snapper all behave similarly. In parts of the Midwest "sheepshead" means freshwater drum, a much softer, different fish.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick. Dredging the balls in flour amounts in effect to a beurre manie, with the flour clinging to the outside rather than worked in; figure roughly a tablespoon of flour in total.
- The sauce is short of liquidNineteenth-century drawn butter is normally butter, flour and about a cup of hot water or fish broth, whisked to a light sauce. As written here there is no water at all, and four tablespoons of butter with flour in it will simply be a thick paste. Adding hot cooking liquid a little at a time, off a high heat, gives what the book plainly intends.
- Keep it below a boilOnce all the butter is in, hold the sauce below a boil; hard boiling at that stage risks separating it. Warm and whisk, then take it off the heat before the lemon juice and parsley go in.
- YieldA 3-4 lb whole fish serves four generously. The sauce quantity is modest for that number; doubling it is reasonable.
"Drawn butter" is the standard American and English sauce name of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for melted butter thickened with a little flour, served over boiled fish, vegetables and puddings; it was beginning to give ground to the French-influenced vocabulary of white sauces, though it remained in use in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. Sheepshead was a genuinely commercial fish then, common enough in Atlantic and Gulf markets to appear as a matter of course in general household cookbooks, and its firmness made it a natural candidate for boiling whole, a treatment that demanded a fish that would not fall apart. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and the Delineator, issued its cook book for the same middle-class housekeeper it sold sleeve patterns to, and the emphasis here on presenting the fish whole with parsley and lemon suits that audience's interest in a table that looked correct.