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Boiled Bass
Dress a bass, wash well and drain it, and place in a saucepan of warm water, salted, and set over the fire. When the water boils remove to one side, and simmer gently for twenty minutes, by which time the fish should be quite done. Let it remain in the liquor until wanted, then take out, drain and place on a napkin spread over a dish, garnish with boiled potatoes and sprigs of parsley and serve.
A whole poached fish, served the way a hotel dining room served it in 1896: on a folded linen napkin with boiled potatoes. The method is sound, but the timing assumes a fish larger than most people buy today.
- "Dress" the fishScale, gut, trim the fins and remove the gills; the head and tail stay on. Most fishmongers will do all of this on request, and leaving the head on helps the body hold its shape in the water.
- Size is unstatedOscar's kitchen would have been working with a whole striped bass of several pounds. Twenty minutes suits a fish of roughly 3 to 4 lb; a 1 1/2 lb black bass or branzino will be done in 8 to 10 minutes, and overcooking is the only real way to ruin this dish.
- Never let it boilDon't let it boil hard -- The instruction to draw the pan to one side once the water boils is the hinge of the recipe. Fish held at a rolling boil sheds its skin, splits along the back and turns cottony. Hold the water at 160-180F, where it barely trembles.
- Judging donenessFigure about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder, and check at the thickest point: the flesh should part from the backbone and read 130-135F. Carryover heat continues while it sits in the liquor.
- Salted water, or betterSalt the water as for pasta, about 1 tablespoon per quart. A court bouillon of water with a splash of white wine or vinegar, a sliced onion, a bay leaf and peppercorns costs ten minutes and gives the fish considerably more flavour.
- Holding in the liquorThis works for perhaps 20 to 30 minutes off the heat while the rest of the meal comes together. Beyond that the fish keeps cooking in the residual warmth and goes soft; do not treat it as an open-ended holding instruction.
- The napkinThe folded napkin under the fish is generally explained as absorbing the poaching water that continues to drain out, keeping it from pooling on the platter. Any absorbent cloth or a bed of parsley does the same job.
- ServingA 3 lb bass serves four. The recipe names no sauce, though boiled fish of the period was normally sent out with one; drawn butter, hollandaise or a caper sauce all belong with it.
Boiled fish in a grand hotel kitchen was less a dish than a category, and Oscar Tschirky's book records the plainest version of it so the flourishes could be built on top. Striped bass was the great fish of the New York market in the 1890s, pulled from the Hudson and the Sound and sold whole, and a poached bass in napkin was standard on menus of the period. The napkin service itself is a survival from French table practice, where poisson sur serviette is often said to have signalled that a fish had been cooked in liquid rather than fried. Tschirky was not a cook by trade but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the book has the character of a working reference assembled from the kitchen's files: terse, assuming a professional reader, and far more interested in how a plate reached the table than in explaining what went on before it.