No. 1180

Kingfish a la Bella

Lift off the fillets of a kingfish; remove the skin and pare the pieces into half hearts; season and cover each one with a quenelle forcemeat (No. 90), decorate the top with a circle made of very green halved pistachio nuts, laying channeled mushrooms (No. 118) in the center; dust over the remainder of the forcemeat with finely chopped coral. Place the fillets in a buttered sautoir, moisten with a little court bouillon, and lay a heavy piece of buttered paper on top; cook them in a slow oven, and then dress them with a ravigote sauce (No. 531), sending more of the sauce in a separate sauce-boat.

← No. 1179 Kingfish a la Bateliere Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1181 Kingfish a la Bordelaise →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have a garde-manger's cross-references at hand; stripped of them, this is poached fish fillets under a piped mousseline, baked gently under paper. The hinge is the oven: the forcemeat must set without the fish drying or the decoration browning.

Slow ovenRead this as roughly 300-325F; Ranhofer gives no temperature. The forcemeat needs to set through and the fish to just cook; anything hotter risks puffing and cracking the coating and toughening the fish.
The buttered paperThis is a cartouche - parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down, resting directly on the fish. It traps steam, keeps the surface pale, and helps stop the pistachio and coral decoration from scorching.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, oven-safe. A 10-inch skillet with a metal handle does the job. The fillets should sit in a single layer with room between them.
Quenelle forcemeatRanhofer's No. 90 is a pounded fish forcemeat of the quenelle type. Any modern fish mousseline - raw white fish pureed with egg white, seasoning and cream, worked over ice - will stand in. Keep everything cold or the cream will break.
CoralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns brilliant red when cooked. It was traditionally dried and sieved into a powder used as garnish and colouring. It is hard to source now; smoked paprika gives colour but not the flavour, and the honest option is to leave it off.
Channeled mushroomsTurned or fluted mushroom caps — spiral grooves cut into the crown with a paring knife, then cooked white in lemon water. Purely decorative. A plain small cap, blanched in acidulated water to keep it pale, sits just as well.
Court bouillonOnly "a little" is wanted, enough to keep the pan bottom wet — roughly a quarter inch. This is not a poaching liquid; the fish steams under the paper. Salted water with white wine, a slice of onion, parsley stem and a peppercorn, simmered fifteen minutes and strained, is sufficient.
The fishNorthern kingfish is a small drum, rarely sold outside the mid-Atlantic. Any firm white fillet that lifts clean and holds its shape works: black sea bass, snapper, striped bass. You want fillets thick enough to pare into half-heart shapes, so a fish of two pounds or more.
Timing and yieldRanhofer gives none. At 300F, fillets three-quarters of an inch thick with a quarter-inch of forcemeat take about 18-22 minutes; the mousseline should feel just firm. Figure one dressed fillet per person as a fish course within a longer menu.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's for some thirty years, in two separate spells rather than one continuous stretch, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down at full length in numbered recipes, each leaning on the others through cross-reference, so that no single recipe stands alone. Kingfish appears in it because the northern kingfish, or whiting, was then a cheap and abundant New York market fish, and Ranhofer's habit was to take such fish and dress them in the full French vocabulary: forcemeat, pistachio, coral, ravigote. The "a la Bella" name is unexplained in the book; Delmonico's routinely christened plates for patrons, performers and occasions. What the recipe really documents is the American Gilded Age habit of treating a domestic fish as a canvas for continental technique; the decoration here, a ring of split pistachios around a fluted mushroom, is pure garde-manger showmanship of a kind that survived into the twentieth century and then largely disappeared.