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Baked Fillets of Skate
Skin the fish, divide it into fillets, and dry them on a cloth. Put the fillets into a saucepan with a lump of butter about the size of a walnut, two slices of lemon and a bunch of herbs. Dredge over them a small quantity of flour, then pour in one pint of milk. Add a lump of salt. When three-fourths cooked, drain the fillets, put them on a baking dish, and bake them in a slow oven until nicely browned. Place the fillets on a folded napkin, garnish with fried parsley and serve with a sauce boatful of mixed herb sauce. Skate, Italian Style Put a skate into a saucepan with a clove of garlic, one bay leaf, one or two sprigs of thyme, a small lump of butter, two cloves, and salt and pepper; dredge in a little flour, and cover the fish with milk. Boil gently until the skate is cooked, then remove and drain it. Put in with the cooking stock a few boiled button onions, and boil quickly for a few minutes. Sprinkle some grated cheese at the bottom of a deep dish, put the skate on it, place the onions and some fried sippets of bread round it, and strain the sauce over; cover the top with grated cheese, and bake it for fifteen minutes in a brisk oven. When ready, serve the skate in the same dish.
Two skate recipes run together here, both built on the same method: gentle poaching in milk, then a spell in the oven. The critical variable is the fish itself.
- Buy skate fresh, and smell itSkate carries urea in its flesh, which breaks down into ammonia as it ages. A faint whiff at the counter becomes overwhelming on the plate. Wings should smell clean and of the sea; if there is any ammonia note, do not buy them. Soaking in milk or acidulated water for an hour helps mild cases; both of these recipes happen to poach in milk.
- Fillets and skinningA skate wing is two thin sheets of flesh over a fan of cartilage. Most fishmongers sell it already skinned; if not, the skin pulls away more easily after a brief dip in hot water. "Fillets" here means the flesh lifted off each side of the cartilage, though the wing can be cooked whole and served on the bone, as the Italian-style version assumes.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven is roughly 300F for the first recipe, which is only browning fish already three-quarters cooked. A brisk oven for the Italian version is somewhere around 400-450F, hot enough to set the cheese in the fifteen minutes given.
- A lump of butter the size of a walnutAbout one tablespoon to an ounce (15-30 g). The 'lump of salt' is unspecified: anywhere from a pinch to a scant teaspoon, judged against a pint of milk.
- Poaching timeSkate cooks fast. Thin fillets are three-fourths done in four or five minutes at a bare simmer, and a whole wing in eight to ten. Overcooked skate turns stringy and slides off the cartilage in shreds, so pull it early and let the oven finish the job.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged around the dish. Cut them thin and add them at the last moment or the sauce will soften them.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs, thoroughly dry, dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop sizzling and turn a dark bright green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so blot it well first.
- Mixed herb sauceProbably a white sauce or veloute finished with chopped soft herbs; the recipe does not say which. The poaching milk, thickened with a little butter and flour, makes it without waste.
- YieldNeither recipe specifies a quantity of fish. Reckon on 8 oz of skate wing on the bone per person, or about 5 oz of trimmed fillet.
Skate was a cheap fish for most of the nineteenth century, and its appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that grand hotel cooking drew freely on humble French provincial habits. The French have long prized raie, most famously with black butter and capers, and both preparations here are recognisably French hotel practice: poach in milk with aromatics, then gratinate. The urea in the flesh, which makes freshness so critical, is the same adaptation that lets sharks and rays hold their internal salt balance in seawater. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893 and compiled this book in 1896, at a point when American menus were still being written largely in French and a fish like skate needed a respectable French dress to reach the table.