No. 1155

Flounders a la Joinville

Plies Carrelets ou Limandes a la Joinville

Remove the fillets and the skin on one side; flatten with the handle of a knife and season; cover this side with a fish forcemeat (No. 76) with raw fine herbs, and fold in two; pare and range in a buttered sautoir and stick into each tip a crawfish claw without the smallest end claw; pour over some white wine and a small bit of butter on the top of each fillet; cook in a slack oven, being careful to baste several times while cooking, and as soon as the fish is done, drain them off, dress in a circle and reduce the liquid, adding to it an allemande sauce (No. 407), thickened with shrimp butter (No. 586). Fill the center of the circle made of the fish with a salpicon of shrimp tails and truffles cut in dice; cover the whole (except the crawfish claws) with the sauce and garnish each claw with a paper frill, then serve.

← No. 1154 Flounders a la Genlis Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1156 Flounders a la Jules Janin →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's fillet dish built out of three cross-references, which is how Ranhofer wrote everything. Read the sauce and forcemeat entries first; the fish itself takes about fifteen minutes.

Slack oven"Slack" is the low end of a coal range's working heat, somewhere around 300F by most reckonings. The point is to poach the folded fillets gently in wine and butter, not to brown them; cook until just set rather than by the clock, basting as Ranhofer directs.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, roughly what we would call a saute pan or a shallow flameproof braiser. It matters that it be just large enough to hold the fillets snugly, or the small amount of wine evaporates before it can be reduced into sauce.
Fish forcemeat (No. 76)A cross-reference to Ranhofer's own pounded raw white-fish forcemeat, worked smooth; a food processor does in two minutes what his cooks did with a mortar and a drum sieve. "Raw fine herbs" means uncooked chopped fines herbes -- parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives -- worked in at the end.
Allemande sauce (No. 407)Veloute finished with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison and lemon. Once the yolks are in it must not boil or it will curdle; hold it below a simmer while you mount it with the shrimp butter.
Shrimp butter (No. 586)Shrimp shells and heads pounded with butter, then melted and strained. It is the colour and most of the flavour of the finished sauce, so it goes in off the heat at the end and is not cooked further.
Crawfish claws and frillsPurely decorative, and the trimming instruction means the small pincer is snapped off so a clean claw stands upright at each fillet tip. Paper frills (papillotes) were standard Victorian service dress; skip both without harming the dish.
SalpiconIngredients cut in even small dice and bound with a little of the sauce. Here it is cooked shrimp tails and truffle, spooned into the ring of fillets as a centre garnish.
Fish and yieldFlounder, plaice, dab and sole are interchangeable here, as Ranhofer's own heading (plies, carrelets ou limandes) implies. He gives no quantity of fish and no number of portions; the dish would have been one course among many.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its flatfish chapter runs to dozens of numbered variations distinguished only by garnish and sauce. A la Joinville is one of the fixed nineteenth-century French garnitures, generally traced to the Prince de Joinville, a son of Louis-Philippe, and in classical usage it means shrimp, truffles and mushrooms with a shrimp-butter sauce over poached white fish. The construction here is entirely of its period: nothing is served plain, the fish is stuffed and folded before it is cooked, the sauce is an egg-thickened veloute rather than anything reduced and light, and the plate is finished with crawfish claws standing up in paper frills. Ranhofer's numbered cross-references also show how a large brigade kitchen worked, with forcemeats, compound butters and mother sauces made in bulk each morning and assembled to order.