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Stewed Skate with Caper Sauce
Wash and clean a skate, place it in a saucepan with one sliced onion, a bunch of green onions, two bay leaves, and a small bunch of parsley and thyme; cover the fish with water, add a small quantity of vinegar, season with pepper and salt, and stew it gently until tender. When cooked drain the fish, place it on a hot dish, cover it with caper sauce and serve.
A plain court-bouillon poach in all but name, and the technique still works. Almost everything that can go wrong with skate happens before it reaches the pan.
- Freshness is the hingeSkate, like other rays and sharks, carries urea in its flesh that breaks down into ammonia within a day or two of landing. If the fish smells sharply of ammonia raw, it will taste of it cooked and no amount of vinegar in the pot will hide it. Buy skate that smells clean and faintly of the sea, and cook it the day you buy it.
- What to buyOscar assumes a whole skate, which almost nobody sells now. Ask for skate wings, one 8-10 oz wing per person, skinned on both sides. Two large wings will serve four.
- SourcingSeveral large skate species, including the common skate of the North Atlantic, are now severely depleted or protected. Buy from a fishmonger who can name the species and the fishery; the smaller thornback and winter skates are the ones usually on sale.
- "A small quantity of vinegar"About 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar per quart of water. It helps firm the flesh and cuts any residual ammonia; too much and the fish tastes pickled.
- "Stew it gently"Bring the liquid barely to a simmer and hold it there -- a hard boil shreds the fanned strands of flesh off the cartilage. A wing of this size takes 8 to 12 minutes, and it is done when the flesh slides cleanly from the central cartilage with a knife tip.
- Bunch of green onionsScallions in current usage, tied in a bundle with the parsley and thyme so the aromatics can be lifted out in one go.
- Caper sauceThe sauce itself is not given here; a caper sauce of this period is usually a butter or velouté base with capers and their vinegar. The classic partner for skate is beurre noisette with capers, made by browning butter until it smells of hazelnuts and adding drained capers and a squeeze of lemon off the heat. Either suits.
- DrainingPoached skate holds a great deal of liquid between its strands. Lift it with a slotted fish slice, let it sit a minute on a clean towel, then plate, or the sauce will slide straight off into a puddle.
Skate was cheap fish in Oscar Tschirky's New York, as it was in London and Paris, and its appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book reflects the French kitchen the hotel ran rather than any American appetite for it -- raie au beurre noir was a Paris bistro standard, and the caper-and-acid finish here is the same idea with a hotel sauce in place of black butter. The vinegar in the poaching liquid is doing double duty: it seasons, and it manages the ammonia that rays develop as they age, which is generally given as the reason skate was long distrusted by cooks who did not know to buy it fresh. In Britain the fish carried a further reputation as a poor man's substitute for cod in fried-fish shops.