No. 1191

Fresh Mackerel, Bonnefoy—Fillets

Filets de Maquereau Frais a la Bonnefoy

Cut off the head and thin tail part of three or four fresh and clean mackerel; detach the fillets, season, roll in flour and cook them in clarified butter, turning them when done over on one side. Put into a small saucepan one gill of melted glaze (No. 399) and four to five spoonfuls of thickened tomato sauce (No. 549) and a teaspoonful of chopped shallot cooked in butter; let the sauce boil, then remove it to one side to finish with butter, chopped parsley and lemon juice. Drain the fillets, dress them on a dish and cover with the sauce; serve at the same time small potato balls plainly cooked in salted water and steamed for five or six minutes.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's fish course that stands or falls on two things: mackerel fresh enough to be worth eating, and a sauce finished off the heat. The rest is straightforward pan work.

The hinge: mount the butter off the boilThe sauce is boiled to marry the glaze and tomato, then pulled to the side of the stove before the butter, parsley and lemon go in. If it returns to a boil after the butter, the emulsion breaks and you get a greasy, separated sauce instead of a glossy one.
A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Of melted glaze that is a substantial amount — meat glaze is intensely concentrated, so taste before adding any salt to the sauce.
Glaze (No. 399)Ranhofer's glaze is brown stock reduced until it sets to a sticky, syrupy jelly at room temperature. Commercial demi-glace or a good reduced veal stock stands in; a stock cube does not, being mostly salt.
Thickened tomato sauce (No. 549)A cooked, thickened tomato sauce, not raw tomato purée and not a pasta sauce. Passata reduced with a little roux and stock gets you close.
"Spoonfuls"Ranhofer generally means a tablespoon when he writes spoonful without qualification, so four to five is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup — but the measure is genuinely loose. Judge by consistency: the sauce should coat, not pool.
Cooking the filletsClarified butter tolerates the heat that plain butter will not. Flour-dusted mackerel fillets need about three minutes skin side down and barely a minute after turning; the flesh is thin and goes dry and cottony well before it looks overcooked.
Buying the fishMackerel is oily and turns rancid fast — stiff bodies, clear eyes, no ammonia smell, and cook the day you buy. Three or four fish give six to eight fillets, enough for three or four people as a main course.
The potato ballsScooped with a parisienne cutter from raw potato, boiled in salted water until just tender, then drained and left covered over low heat for five or six minutes to dry out. That drying step is what keeps them from being watery.

A Little History

Sauce Bonnefoy in the classical repertoire is a white bordelaise — white wine, shallot, tarragon, sometimes marrow — so what Charles Ranhofer sets down here, a tomato-and-glaze sauce sharpened with shallot and lemon, is a Delmonico's reading of the name rather than the textbook one; nineteenth-century garnish names traveled loosely between kitchens. The Epicurean (1894) collects three decades of Ranhofer's work at Delmonico's in New York, where mackerel arrived in quantity from the Atlantic fleet through spring and summer and was cheap enough to be everyday food and rich enough to hold up to a meat glaze. The pairing tells you something about how the period cooked oily fish: not with cream or delicacy, but with tomato acid, shallot and lemon set against the fat, the same logic that puts gooseberry sauce beside mackerel in English cookery of the same years.