No. 1182

Kingfish a la Figaro

Raise the fillets from the fish, remove the skin, pare and cut them lengthwise in two; season each piece with salt, pepper and lemon juice, let marinate for one hour then dip them in beaten eggs, bread-crumbs and fry to a fine color. Dress on a napkin and garnish the top with fried parsley and around with lemon. Serve separately mayonnaise sauce (No. 606) with tomato puree (No. 730) strained through a very fine sieve and thoroughly drained, then add to it very finely cut up chervil.

← No. 1181 Kingfish a la Bordelaise Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1183 Kingfish a la Montgolfier →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward breaded fry, but Ranhofer assumes you have his sauce chapters at hand and a cook who knows how to hold frying fat steady. A few notes fill the gaps.

The fishThe kingfish of the New York market was the northern kingfish or whiting (Menticirrhus saxatilis), a small drum with sweet, firm white flesh — not the king mackerel sold as kingfish in Florida today, which is oily and dark and will not behave the same way. Any lean white fillet works: whiting, croaker, black sea bass, snapper, haddock.
Cutting"Pare and cut them lengthwise in two" means trimming the fillet square, then splitting it down its length into two long strips — goujon-style pieces that cook through in the time the crumb takes to color. Thick fillets left whole will brown before the center is set.
The marinadeAn hour in salt, pepper and lemon juice is the hinge. It seasons through and firms the surface so the breading grips, but much beyond an hour the acid begins to opaque and toughen the flesh. Pat the pieces dry before they go into the egg or the coating slides off.
BreadingThe period sequence is egg then crumb; a light dusting of flour before the egg gives a more reliable bond. Use dry fine breadcrumbs rather than panko for the smooth, even color Ranhofer means by "a fine color."
FryingDeep fat at 350–375F, three to four minutes, in batches, is a workable modern equivalent; Ranhofer specifies no temperature. The breading and the fried-parsley garnish point to deep fat here rather than a shallow pan.
Fried parsleyCurly parsley, thoroughly dry, dropped into the same fat for about fifteen seconds until it stops hissing and turns brilliant green. Any water still on the leaves will make the fat erupt; spin or towel it well and stand back.
The sauceMayonnaise slackened with strained, well-drained tomato purée and finished with chervil — essentially sauce Andalouse. The drainage matters: watery purée breaks the emulsion. If chervil is unavailable, a mix of parsley and a little tarragon approximates its anise note.
Raw eggThe mayonnaise is uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs, or a good commercial mayonnaise as the base, if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
Service and yield"Dress on a napkin" means a folded linen napkin on the platter to absorb fat — a wire rack or paper does the same job. Ranhofer gives no yield; two kingfish of a pound or so each, filleted and split, will serve two to three.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of what that restaurant actually served, which is why an unglamorous inshore fish like kingfish gets a run of variations here. Whiting was cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast, and the French kitchen's habit of dignifying humble fish with a dressing and a garnish name is on full display. The origin of "à la Figaro" is not settled — Beaumarchais's barber, Rossini's opera and the Paris newspaper have all been proposed — but in nineteenth-century French cookery the name generally signals a tomato-tinted, herb-flecked sauce, the same logic that gives us sauce Andalouse. Garnishes were commonly named for operas, public figures and performers in this period. The neighbouring entries in this section are No. 1181 à la Bordelaise before it and No. 1183 à la Montgolfier after, the latter usually taken to refer to the balloonists. The dish itself is the everyday backbone of a fish course: marinate, crumb, fry, and let a cold sauce do the work of distinguishing it.