No. 1108

Striped Bass a la Rouennaise

Bass Raye a la Rouennaise

Dress the fish and put it into a fish kettle, moistening with a mirepoix (No. 419), and white wine, adding to it a few branches of parsley; when the fish is done, drain the stock, and reduce it; mingle it with a Normande sauce (No. 509), finished with lobster butter (No. 580). Dish up the fish and garnish around with blanched oysters, mushroom heads, and pike quenelles (No. 90), molded with a teaspoon (No. 155), the whole arranged in clusters. Cover over with half of the sauce, and serve the remainder in a sauce-boat. Besides these garnishings an outside row of trussed crawfish should be added.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stockpot already going, so the instruction is really a list of cross-references. Assembled in a modern kitchen it is a braised whole fish with a rich fish velouté, and the braise itself is the easy part.

The hinge: braise, do not boilThe liquid should barely tremble rather than roll. Ranhofer gives no times or temperatures; a whole 4-5 lb bass will take roughly half an hour, and it is done when the flesh at the backbone is just opaque and parts from the bone. He specifies a fish kettle on the stove, but a covered pan in a low-to-moderate oven is an easier way to hold a steady heat. If you cook to a thermometer, note that the usual food-safety figure for fish is 145F.
Mirepoix (No. 419)Ranhofer's mirepoix functions here as a wet braising base rather than the dry dice of modern usage: broadly root vegetables and aromatics with a little raw ham or bacon, sweated in butter. Check No. 419 for his exact make-up and quantities. Use enough of it, with the white wine, to come partway up the fish.
Normande sauce (No. 509)A fish velouté finished with mushroom and oyster cooking liquor, then thickened with egg yolks and cream. Keep it below a simmer once the yolks go in, and mount the lobster butter off the heat or it will break.
Lobster butter (No. 580)Shells and coral pounded with softened butter, warmed, strained and chilled. Made from the shells of the garnish crawfish or from a single lobster body; there is no commercial substitute that tastes the same, though a little shellfish stock reduction gets partway.
Oysters need two minutesOysters need only seconds -- "Blanched" means dropped into their own liquor just until the edges ruffle, thirty seconds to a minute. Anything longer and they shrink to rubber. Save that liquor for the sauce.
Quenelles molded with a teaspoonPike forcemeat, shaped between two wet teaspoons and poached at about 170F in salted water for 5-6 minutes. Pike is hard to buy in the United States; walleye, pickerel or plain whiting works, and the mixture must be kept very cold to hold the cream.
Crawfish"Trussed" crawfish were cooked whole with the tail bent back under the body so that they stand up around the rim of the dish. Whole cooked crawfish, thawed and warmed, do the same job.
The fish itselfWild striped bass is regulated in most Atlantic states with size and season limits; farmed hybrid striped bass runs 1.5-3 lb and two of them will serve the same number. Black sea bass or a whole branzino also braise well at this size.
YieldRanhofer gives no number; as a dinner-service dish of this kind it would plausibly serve six to eight, presented whole. The garnish clusters are meant to be seen, so use a long platter and keep the second half of the sauce hot in the boat.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's across two separate spells totalling more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's internal reference book, which is why nearly every line points to a numbered recipe elsewhere in the volume. A la rouennaise normally signals Rouen and its ducks, but in the fish chapters of the classical repertoire the Normandy association is often read differently: as pointing to sauce normande, the velouté enriched with oyster liquor, egg yolks and cream, dressed with the shellfish and mushrooms of the Channel coast. Ranhofer has taken that French template and set an American striped bass in it. The crawfish border and the spoon-molded quenelles are pure nineteenth-century service, garnishes arranged in clusters for a platter carried into the dining room rather than plated in the kitchen.