No. 1098

Red Bass. Water Fish

Bass Rouge. "Water Fish"

Cut into short Julienue some carrots, leeks, parsley root and celery root; slice or cut some onions into squares, and put all into a saucepan to moisten with fish broth (No. 195); boil and reduce to a glaze; moisten again with water, add salt and the fish whole, cooking it in this court bouillon. Drain, reduce the stock, thickening it with a little veloute sauce (No 415), the juice of a lemon, and butter; mix in with it blanched parsley leaves. Dress the fish on a folded napkin, surround with sprigs of parsley and serve the sauce separate.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock pots already going, so the two cross-references do most of the work. Handle those and the rest is a straightforward vegetable court bouillon poach.

The hinge: never let it boilA whole fish poached at a rolling boil splits its skin and goes cottony. Bring the court bouillon to a bare shiver, around 170-175F, and hold it there; a 3 lb fish takes roughly 25-30 minutes, or about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder.
No. 195, fish brothRanhofer's fish stock is bones and trimmings simmered with aromatics; the recipe is not reproduced here, so the exact composition should be checked against No. 195 rather than assumed. Any light fish fumet works; do not substitute a dark or heavily reduced commercial stock, which will muddy the pale sauce.
No. 415, velouteA blond roux slackened with stock. Here it is used only as a thickener, a tablespoon or two, so a small quantity of any veloute or even a beurre manie will carry the sauce.
Reduce to a glaze, then start againThe first moistening is cooked down until the vegetables are coated and just short of colouring. That concentrates them before the water goes in, and it is the step that gives an otherwise plain water-poach its flavour. Do not skip to the second moistening.
The fish itself"Bass rouge" is not securely identifiable; red drum or a red-hued sea bass are the likely candidates. Red drum is now subject to harvest restrictions in United States waters; whole striped bass, black sea bass or branzino, 2-3 lb, behave the same way in the pot.
Blanched parsley leavesWhole picked leaves, thirty seconds in salted boiling water and straight into ice water, then dried. They stay bright green in the warm sauce; raw leaves would darken and stew.
Serving on a napkinA folded napkin on the platter absorbs the drips from a drained poached fish so the presentation stays dry. A wire fish grate lined with a clean cloth does the same job and makes the lift out of the pan easier.
YieldA 2-3 lb whole fish serves three to four at table. The sauce, sent separately in a boat, should come to about a cup once reduced and mounted with butter.

A Little History

The quotation marks around "Water Fish" in Ranhofer's title are often read as a translation mark, and the dish is sometimes linked to the northern European family of fish poached in little more than water with root vegetables, known in the Rhineland as Wasserfisch and in Flanders as waterzooi, where the cooking liquid becomes the sauce rather than being thrown out; the parallel is suggestive rather than a documented line of transmission. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years and author of The Epicurean (1894), routinely absorbed such regional dishes into a French service grammar, which is why a peasant technique arrives here with a veloute liaison, a butter finish and a folded napkin. The book's fish chapter is unusually long, and Ranhofer gives a range of preparations for bass. Note also what the recipe assumes: a kitchen where fish broth, veloute and blanched parsley are simply standing by, so that a dish that reads as thirty seconds of instruction in fact rests on a day's prior work.