No. 1198

Spanish Mackerel with Crawfish—Fillets

Filets de Maquereau Espagnol aux ??ses

Lift up the fillets from six small and very ?? mackerel, season and cover the surfaces of the cut sides with a layer of pike forcemeat (No. 90), and fine herbs finished with a piece of red butter (No. 573); flatten the surfaces with the blade of a knife, range them as fast as they are done one beside the other on a well buttered baking pan, dredging fine, herbs on top; put them to cook in a moderate oven from ten to twelve minutes, basting them over with butter; remove and dress them on a dish, cover over with a little veloute sauce (No. 1145) reduced with crawfish broth and finished with red butter (No. 573), and lemon-juice. Rang a cluster of crawfish tails at each end of the dish and serve the remainder of the sauce separately.

← No. 1197 Spanish Mackerel a la Viennet Shad, Herring & Mackerel No. 1199 Spanish Mackerel with Gooseberries—Stuffeed →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's fish course built from three separate preparations the book keeps elsewhere: a pike forcemeat, a crawfish-tinted compound butter, and velouté. Read those numbered cross-references first, because the dish is assembly work rather than cooking.

The OCR gapsThe title and first line are damaged in this scan; the missing words are "aux Écrevisses" (with crawfish) and, most likely, "very fresh" mackerel. Nothing structural is lost."Rang" in the last line is "Range," meaning arrange.
Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven of the period is generally read as somewhere in the 325-375F range. Ten to twelve minutes suits thin mackerel fillets spread with forcemeat; cook until the forcemeat is set through and the fish flakes.
Red butter (No. 573)A shellfish butter rather than a dye: crawfish or lobster shells, and in some period versions the coral, worked with butter and strained. See No. 573 for Ranhofer's own method. It carries both the colour and much of the shellfish flavour. Any shellfish-shell butter you already make will serve.
Pike forcemeat (No. 90)A fish forcemeat of pike; read No. 90 for its exact composition. Pike is hard to buy in much of the US; walleye, or any lean white fish worked cold with egg white and cream, is a workable substitute. Spread it thin or it will not cook through in twelve minutes.
Fine herbs"fines herbes" here means chopped parsley with chervil, chives and tarragon in whatever proportion you have.
Velouté with crawfish brothThe sauce is velouté (No. 1145) let down with the strained cooking liquid from the crawfish, reduced, then finished off the heat with red butter and lemon. Once the butter goes in the sauce must not boil or it will separate.
CrawfishLive crawfish, boiled and picked, give you the tails for the garnish and the shells for the butter and broth in one operation. The recipe sets no quantity; buy enough to make two tail clusters and still have shells to spare.
Spanish mackerelA different fish from the common Atlantic mackerel: milder and firmer. Availability is regional, best on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Six small fish yields twelve fillets; the book gives no number of servings.

A Little History

"Spanish mackerel" carries a run of numbered treatments in The Epicurean, Charles Ranhofer's 1894 compendium of the Delmonico's kitchen, the neighbouring entries here being No. 1197 and No. 1199. The fish was a summer visitor up the Atlantic coast and reached New York markets in good condition once iced rail transport was available. The construction here is standard haute-cuisine practice of the period rather than anything regional: a lean fish masked with a forcemeat of another fish, baked briefly, and unified by a shellfish butter that colours and flavours the sauce at once. Compound shellfish butters of this kind are generally associated with the nineteenth-century French professional kitchen, where pounding the shells in a mortar was the way to get their flavour out; a food processor and a fine strainer now do the same work in minutes.