No. 1134

Cisco, Castillane Sauce

Cisco a la Sauce Castillane

Raise the fillets from both sides of the cisco, remove the skin, and place the fillets when well pared into a bowl or dish, seasoning with salt, pepper, sweet oil, lemon juice, sliced onions, and branches of parsley; let marinate in this for two hours, turning them over occasionally; drain them from the marinade leaving in the vegetables, and dip the fillets into beaten egg, then into bread-crumbs; plunge them in hot frying fat, and fry to a fine color, drain, salt, and dress them on a folded napkin, garnishing with fried parsley. Serve a castillane sauce (No. 443) in a separate sauce-boat

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For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward marinate-crumb-fry preparation from Delmonico's kitchen, complicated only by an obsolete fish and a sauce that lives on another page.

The fishCisco is the lake herring, Coregonus artedi, a small oily whitefish once landed in enormous quantities from the Great Lakes and rarely sold outside the region today. Any small, soft-fleshed oily fish filleted from both sides works the same way: herring, smelt, small whitefish, or sardines. Figure two fillets per person, and expect thin fillets that fry in two to three minutes.
Sweet oilNineteenth-century American cookbooks use "sweet oil" for mild olive oil, as distinct from rank or rancid oil. Any decent olive oil serves.
The marinade is the hingeTwo hours in oil, lemon and onion is doing real work on an oily freshwater fish, cutting the fattiness and firming the flesh. Do not skip it, but do not extend it much either; the acid will begin to break the thin fillets down and they will fall apart in the fat.
Drain properly before breadingRanhofer says to drain the fillets and leave the vegetables behind, and he means it. Wet, oily fillets will not hold egg and crumbs, and stray onion slices burn in the fryer. Pat them dry before the egg.
Frying temperature"Hot frying fat" for a crumbed fillet means 350-375F. Below that the crumbs soak; above it they colour before the fish is cooked through.
Fried parsleyDry parsley sprigs dropped into the same fat for ten to fifteen seconds, then drained and salted. They spit if wet, so dry them thoroughly first, and fry them after the fish while the fat is still hot.
Castillane sauce, No. 443This is a cross-reference to another recipe in the same book, not given here. Sauces under this name in the French repertoire are generally tomato-inflected brown sauces, so if you are not making Ranhofer's No. 443 you can serve a warm tomato-based brown sauce alongside rather than trying to improvise from the name.
The folded napkinFried food was dressed on a folded linen napkin to absorb fat at table. A rack or paper does the job better; if you want the period look, drain on a rack first and transfer to the napkin at the last moment.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is unusually attentive to American regional fish alongside the French repertoire; cisco, or lake herring, was one of the great cheap catches of the Great Lakes in the second half of the nineteenth century, shipped east by rail in ice and also smoked or salted in volume. The name is generally traced to an Ojibwe word by way of French Canadian usage, and it was applied loosely to several whitefish relatives, which is part of why "cisco" means so little on a fish counter now. Overfishing, invasive species and habitat change reduced the commercial fishery through the twentieth century. Treating it as Ranhofer does here, marinated in oil and lemon then crumbed and deep fried, is a standard French answer to an oily fish: acid and heat to keep the richness in check, with a tomato-based sauce served separately so the crust stays crisp.