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Boiled Skate with Black Butter
Boil the skate till tender with small quantities of onion, thyme, parsley, bay leaves, pepper, salt and vinegar in the water. Put some fried parsley in the center of a hot dish, and place some black butter around it. Divide the skate into kiteshaped pieces, put them on the butter and serve.
A short entry that assumes you know two things it never says: what black butter is, and that skate is cooked in a vinegared court bouillon rather than plain water. Both are worth spelling out.
- Black butter means beurre noirButter cooked past nut-brown to a dark brown, then finished off the heat with a splash of the cooking vinegar and often capers. It is not burnt butter — once it smells acrid and the milk solids go black it is finished. Take the pan off the heat while it is still deep amber, since it keeps darkening.
- Buy skate wings, already skinnedToday you buy the wing, skinned, with the soft cartilage running through it. Allow 8 to 10 oz per person; two large wings serve four.
- The ammonia questionSkate is one of the fish that converts urea to ammonia as it ages, and a faintly ammoniated smell in raw skate is one reason vinegar is usual in the poaching water, though the recipe does not say so. If the smell is strong rather than faint, the fish is too far gone; return it.
- Timing"Till tender" reads as a long boil, but a skate wing poaches in 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness, and should barely tremble in the liquid rather than boil. The flesh is done when it slides off the cartilage in ribs. Overcooked skate turns stringy and watery.
- The court bouillonAbout 2 quarts water, half an onion, a few parsley stalks, a sprig of thyme, two bay leaves, a teaspoon of salt and 2 to 3 tablespoons of vinegar. Simmer it 10 minutes before the fish goes in so it has some flavour to give.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs, thoroughly dry, dropped into 350F fat for 15 to 20 seconds until they stop sizzling and go brittle and bright green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so blot it first.
- "Kite-shaped pieces"Cut across the wing, following the natural fan of the cartilage, so each portion is a rough diamond wider at the outer edge. Serve on hot plates — beurre noir sets and dulls the moment it hits a cold surface.
Skate au beurre noir is a French bistro standard, and its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book is often taken as a sign of the Paris repertoire's presence in the Waldorf's kitchen, where the fish list was largely French in technique whatever the American market supplied. Skate was long considered a cheap fish in both countries bony-textured, awkward to dress, and prone to the ammonia note that makes an acidulated poaching liquid standard rather than optional. The pairing with browned butter and vinegar is functional as well as traditional: the acid answers the fish's faint alkalinity, which is generally given as the reason the combination became fixed. Fried parsley as a garnish for boiled fish runs through nineteenth-century service books on both sides of the Atlantic, though it is now rarely seen on restaurant plates.