No. 1153

Flounders a la Dieppoise

Plies Carrelets ou Limandes a la Dieppoise

Season and fold in two the fillets removed from the flounders; place them in a buttered sautoir, laying on each one a small piece of butter; garnish the pointed ones with a crawfish claw, removing the small claw tip, and put them to cook in a slack oven, basting frequently until done. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into a buttered allemande sauce (No. 407); range the fish crown-shaped on a dish and fill up the middle either with oysters or mussels after cutting off the feet, also small channeled mushroom heads (No. 118); strain the sauce and pour it over the whole.

← No. 1152 Flounders Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1154 Flounders a la Genlis →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has stock, sauce and garnishes standing by, so the instructions are compressed. The hinge is the sauce: allemande is thickened with egg yolks, and the lemon juice and butter go in off the heat or it will break.

Slack ovenA slack oven means a cool one, well below roasting heat; somewhere in the region of 275-300F suits. The fillets are meant to cook gently in butter rather than brown, and the recipe has you baste them frequently while they do. Thin fillets folded in two will be done quickly, so check early.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow saute pan, not a casserole dish. Any oven-safe skillet or shallow baking dish of a size that holds the folded fillets snugly will do; too large a pan and the butter scorches.
Allemande sauceRanhofer's No. 407 is a velouté (white stock plus roux) finished with egg yolks and cream, then strained. It curdles above a bare simmer. Add the lemon juice and the finishing butter with the pan off the heat, whisking, and hold it warm rather than hot.
Channeled mushroom headsHis No. 118 means small button caps with shallow curved grooves cut into the crown with a knife tip, cooked in butter, water and lemon juice to keep them white. The channeling is for looks; plain caps will eat much the same.
Cutting off the feetFor mussels this is the beard, the fibrous byssus, which is tough and must be pulled away. With oysters the term is less clear; it is usually taken to mean trimming the tough muscle and the frill. Both need only brief cooking -- mussels until they open, oysters until the edges ruffle -- then held in their own liquor. Longer and they turn to rubber.
Crawfish clawsCooked crawfish claws with the small pincer tip snapped off, pushed into the pointed end of each fillet as a garnish. Whole cooked shell-on shrimp or langoustine claws stand in without altering the dish.
Fillet count and yieldA flounder gives four fillets, two per side. The original gives no quantities; three or four fish will serve four, with enough shellfish and small mushroom caps to fill the centre of the dish.
AssemblyArrange the folded fillets radiating around the rim of a warm platter, pile the drained shellfish and mushrooms in the middle, and coat with the strained sauce at the last moment. It is a dish that cannot wait; the sauce skins over and the fish weeps.

A Little History

À la dieppoise names the fishing port of Dieppe on the Normandy coast, and in classical French cookery it signals a white-wine-and-cream garnish of mussels, shrimp and mushrooms -- the produce of that harbor and its boats. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working encyclopedia of that repertoire, which is why the entry reads as a set of cross-references rather than a standalone recipe: sauce allemande, turned mushrooms and crawfish garnish all live at their own numbers elsewhere in the book. Oysters appear here as an equal option to mussels, and New York harbor oysters were still cheap and abundant in the 1890s. The flounder itself is a plentiful flatfish dressed up with an egg-thickened sauce and a shellfish crown until it could carry a French name onto a Delmonico's menu.