No. 1187

Kingfish on the Dish—Gastrite

Kingfish sur le Plat--Gastrite

Cut off the fins from well cleaned fish, split them from head to tail on the belly side, in order to take out the dorsal bone: season with salt and pepper. Butter the bottom of a small baking dish, cover it over with chopped mushrooms and onions, and lay the open kingfish on top upside down, the skin side underneath; pour half a gill of white wine in the bottom of the dish, and besprinkle the top with gastrite; pour over a little melted butter, and bake in a moderate oven for twelve to fifteen minutes. After taking the fish from the fire, slip into the bottom a few spoonfuls of half-glaze sauce (No. 413) finished with lemon juice.

For the Gastrite.—Take the crumb part of a stale loaf of bread, put it in a towel with a little flour, close the towel and work the bread so it will crumble, then pass it through a fine sieve, and mix it with a little chopped up parsley and grated parmesan or Swiss cheese.

← No. 1186 Kingfish, Baked Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1188 Lafayette Fish, Breaded English Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

A small whole fish baked on a bed of mushroom and onion under a cheese-and-crumb topping, then finished with a spoonful of dark sauce. Ranhofer assumes a professional kitchen with demi-glace already on the stove, which is the one thing a home cook has to plan around.

What kingfish means hereIn a New York book of the 1890s this is the northern kingfish (Menticirrhus saxatilis), a small drum weighing under a pound, not the tropical king mackerel sold under that name today. Whiting, small croaker or any firm panfish of 3/4 to 1 lb dressed will behave the same way.
Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup — enough to moisten the vegetable bed, not to poach the fish.
Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350-375F. Twelve to fifteen minutes suits a whole boned fish of well under a pound; cook until the flesh is just opaque at the thickest point (145F is the usual food-safety figure for fish, though kitchens often pull it a little earlier and let it carry over). A larger fish needs longer, and overcooking is the only real way to ruin this.
Boning the fishSplitting from the belly and lifting out the backbone leaves the two fillets joined along the back, so the fish opens flat like a book. Laying it skin side down on the mushrooms means the crumb topping browns on cut flesh, which is the point.
Chop the vegetables fineThe mushrooms and onions go in raw and have only twelve minutes under a fish. Chop them to a near-duxelles fineness, or they stay crunchy and watery beneath an otherwise cooked dish.
GastriteRanhofer's name here for a gratin topping: dry breadcrumbs sieved fine, worked with a little flour, then mixed with chopped parsley and grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese, as the recipe has it. Roughly two parts crumb to one part cheese by volume is a workable ratio; the recipe gives none. Working stale crumb in a floured towel keeps it from clumping.
Half-glaze sauceNo. 413 is demi-glace, a reduced brown sauce. Without one on hand, a well-reduced brown stock sharpened with lemon is the honest substitute; a spoonful or two slipped into the bottom of the dish is all that is called for, and it goes under the fish rather than over the crust.
ServingSur le plat means the dish it bakes in is the dish it reaches the table in, so use individual gratin dishes. One fish per person.

A Little History

This is entry No. 1187 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his long service as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Northern kingfish was then a common market fish along the mid-Atlantic coast, small enough to serve whole, and the book gives it several treatments in a row. Sur le plat — literally "on the dish" — describes preparations cooked and served in the same small vessel, saving both a transfer and a cooling. "Gastrite" is not standard French culinary vocabulary; it appears here as Ranhofer's label for the crumb-parsley-cheese mixture, the same thing found elsewhere simply as a gratin or chapelure topping. The finishing gesture of sliding half-glaze beneath the cooked fish, rather than pouring it over the browned crust, is characteristic of the period's brown-sauce cookery applied to seafood.