No. 1110

Striped Bass Boiled with Hollandaise Modern Sauce

Bass Raye bouilli, Sauce Hollandaise Moderne

Wash and clean well a six pound bass, tie down the head and put it into a fish-boiler with plenty of salt and a large bunch of parsley garnished with a clove of garlic; cover it entirely with cold water containing a little vinegar. Set the kettle on a brisk fire, boil the liquid, skimming off the scum at the first boil, then place it on one side of the range to keep bubbling while covered for three-quarters of an hour; drain and dress it on a folded napkin, garnishing one side with boiled potato balls and the other with small potato croquettes (No. 2782), shaped either as balls or olives, and at the ends lay very green sprigs of parsley. Accompany this with a sauce-boat of modern hollandaise sauce (No. 501).

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A whole poached bass dressed on a napkin, in the grand service of Delmonico's kitchen. The one thing worth changing is the cooking time: three-quarters of an hour at a bubble will leave the flesh dry and cottony.

Timing is the hingeA 6 lb striped bass needs roughly 25-30 minutes in liquid held at 160-175F; the USDA figure for fish is 145F at the thickest part, though many cooks pull it lower. Ranhofer's 45 minutes produces much firmer, fully set flesh than most cooks would want today.
Keep it below a boilBring the court bouillon to a boil to raise the scum, skim, then drop the heat so the surface only shivers. "Keep bubbling" in a coal range meant the cool side of the stove, not a rolling simmer, and vigorous boiling will tear the skin and cloud the liquid.
The fish-boilerA long oval kettle with a perforated lift-out rack. A roasting pan works: lay the fish on a doubled sheet of cheesecloth with long ends, or on a folded strip of foil, so you can lift it out unbroken.
Tying down the headTrussing the head with kitchen twine keeps the fish from curling and the gill covers from splaying open. Wrapping the whole fish loosely in cheesecloth does the same job more forgivingly.
The poaching liquidSalt generously, about 1 tablespoon per quart. The vinegar is meant to be a splash rather than a measured quantity: enough acid to firm the surface and keep the flesh white, and no more, or you will taste it.
Cold water startThe fish goes in covered with cold liquid and comes up with it, which cooks it evenly from the outside in. Slipping a whole large fish into hot water sets and splits the skin.
The garnishesNo. 2782 is Ranhofer's potato croquette: duchesse potato shaped, breaded and deep-fried. Boiled potato balls are simply scooped with a melon baller and simmered. Both can be made ahead, the croquettes fried at the last minute.
Hollandaise moderneNo. 501 is the butter-and-egg emulsion we now call hollandaise. Older sauces under the hollandaise name were often flour-thickened, which is the likeliest sense of Ranhofer's "modern," though he does not say so. Hold it near 140F in a warm bain-marie, never over direct heat.
Yield and the fish itselfSix pounds serves eight generously. Wild striped bass is subject to size and season limits in much of its range; farmed hybrid striped bass runs 2-3 lb, so two fish or a whole salmon-trout substitute may be more practical.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Bass rayé is simply the French for striped bass, a fish then pulled in enormous quantities from the Hudson and the Atlantic shore and treated in New York restaurants with the ceremony a Parisian kitchen reserved for turbot: poached whole, laid on a folded napkin to absorb the drip, ringed with potato work, and sent out with a sauceboat alongside. The label "moderne" on the hollandaise marks a real shift in nineteenth-century sauce-making, away from the older flour-bound Dutch sauce toward the warm butter emulsion mounted on egg yolks that we now mean by the name without qualification. The napkin, the symmetrical two-sided garnish and the parsley at each end belong to a style of service in which a whole fish was carried to the table for display before being portioned at the sideboard.