No. 1156

Flounders a la Jules Janin

Plies Carrelets ou Limandes a la Jules Janin

Remove the fillets from the flounders, from these remove the black skin, season, cover with a quenelle forcemeat (No. 90), pare, and fold them in two; lay these fillets on a buttered dish, moisten with white wine, pour over some butter, and set the dish in the oven. When they are done drain them into a sautoir, straining the liquid; reduce this with an espagnole sauce (No. 414) and Madeira; garnish the fish ranged in a circle with oysters, sliced truffles, and crawfish tails. Butter the sauce, pass it through a tammy, and pour it over the whole.

← No. 1155 Flounders a la Joinville Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1157 Flounders a la Madeleine →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock pots already going, so the work here is mostly in the cross-references. Read them first: the forcemeat and the espagnole are the dish, and the flounder is the wrapper.

The cross-referenced recipesNo. 90 is a quenelle forcemeat — pounded raw fish or veal bound with panada, egg and cream; a modern fish mousseline of fillet, egg white and cream in a food processor gives the same result. No. 414 is espagnole, the brown roux-based mother sauce built on veal stock; a well-reduced brown veal or chicken stock, lightly thickened, stands in without insulting the dish.
Oven heatNo temperature is given because the recipe assumes a range oven judged by hand. Thin fillets with a forcemeat coating want a moderate oven, 350F, until the forcemeat is just set — eight to twelve minutes depending on thickness. They will be cooked before the wine has reduced much, which is why the liquid is strained off and reduced separately.
Sautoir and tammyA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan, the modern saute pan; the text is ambiguous as to whether the drained fillets or the strained liquid go into it, and the reduction may well happen in the same pan. A tammy is a woollen straining cloth wrung between two people -- a fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a doubled square of muslin, does the job.
"Butter the sauce"Monter au beurre: cold butter whisked into the reduced sauce off direct heat, which thickens it and gives the gloss. Once buttered the sauce must not boil or it will break, so finish it last and pour immediately.
The black skinFlounder is skinned from the dark side, and that is all Ranhofer specifies: the black skin off, so the forcemeat has clean flesh to adhere to. Ask the fishmonger for skinless fillets and the first clause disappears.
OystersThe garnish oysters should be barely poached in their own liquor -- thirty seconds to a minute, until the edges ruffle -- then held off the heat. Overcooked they turn to rubber. Ranhofer gives no instruction for them here.
Crawfish tails and trufflesCrawfish (crayfish) tails were a standard nineteenth-century garnish and are sold cooked and peeled, frozen, in most places; small shrimp are an honest substitute. Fresh black truffle is the intended article, but a few slices of preserved truffle, or none at all, will not ruin the sauce.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, reckon two fillets per person; four small flounders, filleted, will give something like 1.5 lb of fillets, and half a pound of forcemeat will cover them -- enough for four as a first course.

A Little History

Jules Janin (1804–1874) was the drama critic of the Journal des Débats for some forty years and was known in his lifetime as the "prince of critics" — a Parisian literary celebrity of exactly the kind that nineteenth-century chefs liked to name a dish for, alongside Rossini, Sarah Bernhardt and the Duc de Richelieu. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, had trained in France and carried this whole vocabulary of dedications with him; his flounder chapter runs through Joinville, Janin and Madeleine in sequence, each a slight variation on the same operation of filleting, stuffing and saucing. The dish itself is a compact demonstration of classical fish cookery: the fillet poached in wine in the oven, the poaching liquid reduced back into the sauce so nothing is lost, and a garnish of oysters, truffles and crawfish that in the 1890s signalled expense as plainly as the name on the menu did.