No. 1179

Kingfish a la Bateliere

Cut a half pound kingfish crosswise into two pieces; range them in a low saucepan moistening with red wine; season with salt, pepper, cloves, garlic, mushroom parings, and add one gill of brandy, pouring it slowly over the other ingredients, set it on the fire and throw in some small onions fried and previously blanched; leave them in for ten minutes on a hot fire. Dress the fish and garnish the intersections with the small onions, strain the sauce through a tammy, add to it butter, and pour it over all; surround with heart-shaped croutons of bread fried in butter and crawfish.

Some kingfish weigh as much as three pounds.

← No. 1178 Herrings—Smoked and Salted—with Cream Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1180 Kingfish a la Bella →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's shorthand assumes a professional brigade and a stocked larder, so several steps need filling in. The hinge is the finish: the strained wine reduction is mounted with cold butter off the heat, and it must not boil after that or it will break.

A gill of brandyA gill is half a cup, which is a great deal of spirit for half a pound of fish. Ranhofer's proportions here are written for the flavour of the sauce rather than balance on the plate; a tablespoon or two, flamed or reduced, gives the same character without swamping the wine.
Which kingfishIn 1890s New York markets "kingfish" usually meant the northern kingfish or whiting, a small firm-fleshed drum, which does reach about three pounds, as Ranhofer's closing note says. Any firm white saltwater fish cut into thick crosswise steaks works: drum, snapper, striped bass, or mackerel if you want something oilier.
Mushroom paringsThe peelings, stems and trimmings left from turning mushrooms for garnish, kept for stocks and sauces. Whole cremini stems or a few sliced mushrooms give the same woody depth; they are strained out before serving.
TammyA tammy is a worsted or fine woollen straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois, or a fine-mesh sieve lined with a doubled square of muslin, does the job.
Ten minutes on a hot fireAim for a steady simmer rather than a hard boil, and treat ten minutes as an upper limit. Cooks often pull thick steaks of firm fish at about 130-135F at the centre, though the USDA figure for fish is 145F; the fish is lifted out and kept warm while the liquid is finished.
The small onionsPearl or small boiling onions, dropped in boiling water briefly to loosen the skins and take the rawness out, then browned in butter. They go in whole and are used afterwards to fill the gaps between the pieces of fish.
Crawfish and croutonsThe crawfish are cooked whole and used as garnish around the rim, in the old matelote manner. Triangular or heart-shaped bread croutons should be fried in clarified butter so they hold up under the sauce.
YieldHalf a pound of fish in two pieces is one generous portion or two small ones. Scale the wine, brandy and aromatics with the fish; the sauce is meant to be a few spoonfuls per plate, not a pool.

A Little History

A la batelière is generally read as "boatwoman's style," often said to be the feminine counterpart of the better-known matelote (sailor's style) — both names attached in nineteenth-century French cookery to fish stewed in wine with small onions, mushrooms and fried bread, garnished in the classic version with crayfish and a poached egg. The pairing of red wine with fish, which now reads as a deliberate provocation, was simply the freshwater and riverside tradition: these were dishes of barge and river inns, where the wine was whatever was local. Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, took the Parisian repertoire wholesale into The Epicurean (1894) and fitted American market fish into it, which is how a French river-boatman's garnish came to sit around a New York kingfish.