No. 1118

Bluefish, Havanese Style

Bluefish a la Havanaise

Clean a bluefish weighing six pounds; wash and wipe it nicely; raise the fillets, suppress the skin and pare them half heart shaped. Put some clarified butter into a sautoir on a brisk fire and when hot, lay in the pieces of fish; saute, then drain and dry them, afterward dress them crown shaped on a baking dish. Have already prepared a good tomato sauce made from peeled tomatoes cut into five-eighths inch squares, minced mushrooms and four ounces of onions cut into three sixteenth inch pieces; half a pound of sweet peppers, half a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414), two pints of fish broth (No. 195); reduce the whole properly and cover the fish thickly with this preparation, then set it into the oven and serve after a few moments, dredging over some chopped up parsley.

← No. 1117 Bluefish a la Barnave Bass, Blackfish & Bluefish No. 1119 Bluefish Deviled →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock pots already going; the whole dish hinges on the sauce being finished and thick before the fish ever meets it. Read the sauce paragraph first and build it in advance.

The hinge: the fish cooks twiceThe fillets are sautéed, then returned to a hot oven under the sauce. Take them out of the pan while the centre is still translucent, or the second heating will leave them dry and cottony. "A few moments" in the oven means just that: long enough to heat through and glaze the surface. Ranhofer gives no temperature.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, essentially a modern sauté pan or a large skillet. Clarified butter is specified because whole butter would brown and burn at the heat needed to colour the fish.
Espagnole and fish brothNo. 414 is Ranhofer's espagnole, a brown sauce built on a long-cooked roux and brown stock; No. 195 is his fish broth. Half a pint of espagnole is one cup; two pints of broth is four cups. A cup of good demi-glace stands in for the espagnole, and the instruction to "reduce the whole properly" means the liquid should be cooked down substantially before it goes over the fish.
Sweet peppersHalf a pound is about one large bell pepper or two small ones. Peel or roast them if you want a smoother texture. Seed and dice to match the tomato.
"Pared half heart shaped"A trimming instruction, not a cooking one. Trim the fillet pieces so they are even in thickness and can be stood up in a ring, as the "crown shaped" dressing requires. Uniform thickness matters more than the exact shape.
TomatoesPeeled and cut in five-eighths-inch dice, a generous half inch. Fresh is intended; drained canned whole tomatoes, diced, are closer to the original than crushed or purée, which would make the sauce loose.
Reduce properlyThe sauce should be thick enough to sit on the fish in a coat rather than run off it — around the consistency of a thick ragù. Reduce it uncovered and season at the end, since reduction concentrates salt.
YieldA six-pound bluefish gives roughly two pounds of trimmed skinless fillet, serving six. Smaller fish are easier to fillet, but two two-pound fish will yield noticeably less flesh than the six-pounder called for.
About bluefishIt is oily and strongly flavoured, and goes off faster than most fish. Buy it the day you cook it; the sauce is assertive precisely because the fish is.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, where he was chef for over thirty years, and it runs to thousands of numbered preparations cross-referenced to one another the way this one calls out sauces No. 414 and No. 195. "À la Havanaise" was nineteenth-century menu French for the Cuban manner, and here it amounts to tomato, onion and sweet pepper laid over something else. New York's trade with Havana was heavy through the sugar years, and Cuban-styled dishes carried a certain fashionable warmth on a Delmonico's card. Bluefish itself is thoroughly local — an Atlantic migratory fish landed in quantity off Long Island and New Jersey, cheap enough to be common and oily enough to stand up to a brown sauce, which is why it takes up a full run of numbered recipes in a book otherwise devoted to luxury.