No. 1197

Spanish Mackerel a la Viennet

Maquereau Espagnol a la Viennet

Chop up separately some onions, shallots, and mushrooms; fry the onions and shallots in butter then add the chopped mushrooms; lay on top mackerel fillets pared half heart-shaped, season with salt, mignonette, and nutmeg; place over a liberal piece of butter, cover with a strong buttered paper, and set the pan in the oven for fifteen minutes, then drain off the butter, and add a little white wine, espagnole sauce (No. 414), and tomato sauce (No. 549). Dress the fish, reduce the sauce, and when ready pass through a tammy and pour it over the fillets.

← No. 1196 Spanish Mackerel a la Perigord Shad, Herring & Mackerel No. 1198 Spanish Mackerel with Crawfish—Fillets →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with stock sauces already on hand; the whole dish is really a duxelles-style bed, a paper-covered oven braise, and two mother sauces reduced together. Read the ingredient list as a shopping list and the timing as a maximum.

MignonetteNot the sauce for oysters. In Ranhofer's usage mignonette is coarsely cracked white peppercorns.
Pared half heart-shapedA trimming instruction: each fillet is cut so one end tapers to a point and the other is rounded. The recipe gives no quantities; for a modern cook, skinless fillets from two 2 to 3 lb Spanish mackerel will serve about four.
The buttered paperA sheet of paper, buttered and laid over the fish, in the manner of what is now called a cartouche. It traps steam and keeps the surface from drying.
Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in the period. A moderate oven, in the region of 350 to 375F, is a workable modern equivalent.
Fifteen minutes is a ceilingFifteen minutes -- Spanish mackerel is oily but fine-grained and it overcooks fast. Half-inch fillets under paper will be done in 8 to 10 minutes, at the point where the flesh has just lost its translucence; the book's fifteen minutes suits thick fillets.
Espagnole and tomato sauceNo. 414 is a brown veal-stock sauce built on a long-cooked roux; No. 549 is a cooked tomato sauce, not a raw purée. A plain reduced tomato sauce will stand in for them, in whatever proportion suits; the recipe specifies none.
Pass through a tammyA tammy is a fine woven cloth the sauce was forced through with a wooden spoon. A chinois with a ladle, or a fine sieve, does the job; the point is a sauce with no fragments of onion or mushroom in it.
Draining the butterDo not skip this. The pan butter will have taken up fish liquor, and leaving it in makes the finished sauce greasy and impossible to reduce cleanly.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its fish chapters show how thoroughly a French kitchen adopted American species. Spanish mackerel, an Atlantic coastal fish that runs north in summer, was a prestige item on New York menus in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Ranhofer gives it a number of treatments. The tml: