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Boiled Sheepshead
Wash and clean the fish well, rub it over with dry salt, and soak it in cold water for an hour. Remove it from the water, wipe dry, score it several times across both sides, and rub it with a lemon cut into halves. Lay the fish on a drainer over a fish kettle, cover it with cold water and milk equally mixed, add one tablespoonful of salt, let it gradually boil, and then gently simmer for half an hour. In dishing the fish be careful to transfer it from the kettle to the dish without breaking it. Pour a little of the cooking liquor round and serve the balance in a sauceboat.
A plain milk-and-water poach for a large whole fish, written for a kitchen that owned a proper fish kettle. The method is sound; the timing belongs to an era of much bigger fish and much softer expectations.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe instruction to "let it gradually boil" is best read as bringing the liquid just to the point of trembling, then dropping the heat at once. Held at a true boil the flesh of sheepshead shreds and the skin splits, and the whole point of the drainer is to lift out an unbroken fish. Keep the liquid at 170-180F, barely shivering.
- Half an hour is for a big fishThe timing suits a whole sheepshead of several pounds, which does want roughly that long. A 2 lb fish or a set of thick fillets is done in 10-15 minutes. Measure at the thickest point and pull it at 130-135F, or when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- Fish kettle and drainerA fish kettle is a long lidded pan with a perforated tray and handles for lifting. Substitute a roasting pan on the stovetop with the fish on a rack, or wrap it in a double layer of cheesecloth leaving long ends to use as slings.
- Milk and waterEqual parts whole milk and cold water is a classic white poach; it keeps the flesh pale and firm and mutes any muddiness. The milk may curdle slightly and catch on the bottom of the pan; that is normal. Nonfat milk gives a thinner, less protective liquid.
- Salting and soakingThe dry-salt rub and hour-long soak firm the surface and draw off blood and slime. One tablespoon of salt in the poaching liquid is light for several quarts of liquid; season for taste rather than by the spoonful.
- SheepsheadOn the Atlantic coast this means Archosargus probatocephalus, the porgy relative with human-looking teeth; in the Great Lakes and Mississippi the name is used for freshwater drum. Either poaches well. Black sea bass, red drum, striped bass or any firm white whole fish behaves the same way.
- The sauceThe strained cooking liquor alone is thin and faintly milky. Period service would have been an egg sauce, a caper or shrimp sauce, or drawn butter built on that liquor; reduce it, thicken lightly, and finish with butter and lemon.
- YieldA whole fish of a few pounds serves 4-6. Serve it on a hot platter with plain boiled potatoes, and skin the top side at the table if the skin has toughened.
Sheepshead was a New York restaurant staple in Oscar Tschirky's day, common enough on the Atlantic seaboard that a Brooklyn neighborhood and racetrack took its name from the fish. The technique here is straight out of the Anglo-French repertoire that governed hotel kitchens around 1900: a whole fish poached in a bland white liquid, lifted intact on a drainer, and dressed at the last moment with a separate sauce. The milk-and-water bath was used for pale-fleshed fish and for brains and sweetbreads alike, valued for keeping the flesh white rather than for any flavor of its own. That such a recipe sat in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf at all reflects the volume's purpose: it is less a collection of signature dishes than an attempt to set down, for domestic readers, the standard operating procedure of a great hotel kitchen, unbroken fish and sauceboat included.