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Fricassee of Flounders
Take one or two flounders, clean and wash thoroughly; remove the fillets carefully and dust them over with salt and flour, plunge them into boiling fat and fry. Chop finely one dozen oysters, put them with their liquor into a saucepan, pour in a tumblerful of white wine, add three boned anchovies, and salt, pepper and grated nutmeg to taste. Let them cook gently for two or three minutes, then put in the fillets, give the pan a shake, warm all up together, turn the whole out on to a hot dish and serve with slices of lemon for garnish.
A fast dish that only works if the fish is fried crisp and the sauce is finished before the fillets go in. Everything after that point is a warm-through, not a simmer.
- The hinge: don't cook the fish twiceThe fillets are already cooked when they leave the fat. Once they hit the oyster sauce it is a matter of thirty seconds to a minute over low heat, just long enough to warm them. Any longer and thin flounder fillets fall apart and the crust turns to paste.
- A tumblerfulRoughly 8 fl oz, one cup. A dry white with some acidity works; a heavy oaked wine will dominate the oysters.
- Boned anchoviesIn 1896 this usually meant salt-packed anchovies rinsed and lifted off the backbone. Oil-packed fillets from a tin are the practical modern substitute — three of them, mashed with a fork so they dissolve into the wine rather than sitting in lumps.
- SaltOyster liquor and anchovies are both saline, so season the fish before frying and taste the sauce only at the end.
- OystersA dozen shucked oysters with their liquor is about 6-8 oz of meat and a few tablespoons of liquid. Two or three minutes in the wine is right — the aim is to set them and reduce the raw edge off the wine, not to firm them up.
- FryingSalt and flour only, no egg or crumb, so the fat needs to be properly hot (modern deep-frying practice would put it around 375F, though the recipe says only 'boiling fat') and the fillets patted dry. Two or three minutes should turn them golden. Drain them briefly before they meet the sauce.
- FilletingOne flounder of about 1 lb yields four small fillets. Keep the frames and heads: simmered twenty minutes with the oyster liquor they make a better base than wine alone, though the original does not ask for it.
- YieldTwo flounders, a dozen oysters and a cup of wine serve two generously as a main course, or four as a first course.
Fricassee normally means meat gently stewed in a pale sauce, and applying the word to fried fish has a long history of its own — in both English and French cookery well before 1800 — what the dish really is is a fried fillet dressed with an oyster and anchovy ragout. That pairing is older than the Waldorf: anchovy and oysters were often combined in English fish sauces, the ancestors of bottled anchovy essence and Worcestershire. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, compiled his book in 1896, when New York oysters were cheap enough to be treated as a seasoning rather than a luxury, and flounder came off the boats at Fulton Market. The lemon slices are the only garnish because the sauce is already doing the ornamental work.