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Attelettes of Fish
Cut a slice of any fish to a little more than half an inch thick, remove the skin, and divide the slice in two, having removed the bone. Cut the slices into very thin strips, forming the attelettes, salt, dip them in oil, roll in Hour, and plunge them into hot fat to fry. As soon as the flesh is firm, take them out with a skimmer, drain, season them with salt, and dish up with a little fried parsley.
Note that this process is simply one of frying strips of flesh, and may therefore be applied equally well to almost any kind of fish flesh which may be convenient. The hot fat must be hotter than boiling water, and a thick batter may be used instead of oil and flour. Anchovy sauce goes well with these fish attelettes.
For this kind of dish it is well to have small silver skewers, about four inches long and of the thickness of a packing needle, with a ring or fancy design on the top, the persons eating what is served on them, taking the head of the skewer with the thumb and fingers of the left hand and picking it off with a fork.
A deep-fried fish dish built for the table service of a grand hotel: thin strips of white fish, fried hard and fast, then threaded onto ornamental skewers. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the temperature of the fat.
- "Hotter than boiling water" means 350-375F"Hotter than boiling water" is the only guidance Oscar gives -- it tells you the fat must be above 212F and no more. In practice strips this thin want fat at 350-375F so the coating sets before the flesh dries; below about 325F they absorb grease and slump.
- Cut and timingA slice a little over half an inch thick, split and cut into thin strips, cooks through in roughly 1 to 2 minutes. "As soon as the flesh is firm" is literal -- pull them the moment they stop flexing, since strips this size carry on cooking as they drain.
- Attelettes are the skewers, not the fishAttelettes -- usually taken as a variant of the French hâtelet, the decorative skewer -- came to be used loosely for the skewer and for what was served on it; Oscar himself applies the word to the strips of fish. The four-inch silver skewers he describes are a service flourish; short bamboo skewers do the same job, or serve the strips loose.
- The coatingOil then flour gives a very thin, crisp shell. The alternative Oscar offers -- a thick batter -- behaves quite differently and needs a little more time in the fat. Do not do both; flour over batter goes pasty.
- Choice of fishAny firm white fish holds up: cod, haddock, halibut, pollock. Delicate fish such as sole or flounder tear when skewered. Remove the pin bones as well as the frame bone, since nobody can pick them out of a strip this size.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly before they go anywhere near the fat, or the water in them will make it spit violently. A few seconds is all they take, and they should come out dark green, not brown.
- Anchovy sauceThe period sauce is a white or butter sauce worked with anchovy essence. Anchovy paste stirred into melted butter with lemon gets you close; taste before adding salt, as the fish has already been salted twice.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working record of French hotel cookery as it was practised for wealthy New Yorkers. Hâtelets -- ornamental silver skewers, often topped with a crest or a scrolled finial -- were part of the visual grammar of that cooking: garnishes and small fried items were mounted on them and stuck upright into a dish so that a platter arrived at the table with height and glitter. Escoffier's generation eventually pruned this kind of decoration away as fussy, and the skewers survive today mainly in museum collections of hotel plate. What is telling here is Oscar's aside that the method "is simply one of frying strips of flesh" and can be turned to whatever fish is at hand: beneath the silverware, this is a hotel cook explaining how to use up the trim.