No. 1205

Matelote of Fishermen

Matelote des Pecheurs

Clean well a small eel, a carp, a pike, and a tench; cut them up into slices after suppressing the heads and thin parts, then salt them. Cook in a saucepan some minced onions, add the heads and bones from the fish, and two minutes after moisten with white wine; put in a bunch of parsley garnished with garlic, mushroom peelings and salt, then cook this broth for twenty minutes; strain, remove the fat, and pour it into a saucepan to thicken with kneaded butter (No. 579); let cook for seven or eight minutes. Wipe well the pieces of fish, put them into a saucepan wider than its height, cover with the sauce, adding two dozen uncooked mushrooms and let all boil for fifteen minutes on a brisk fire, being careful to remove each piece of fish as soon as it is done. Dress these pieces on a deep dish over thin flat crusts of bread browned in butter, surrounded with the mushrooms, then reduce the sauce without ceasing to stir; butter it off from the fire and finish by adding to the sauce pieces of four ounces each, and the juice of a lemon; pour this over the fish.

← No. 1204 Matelote of Carp, Miroir Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1206 Mullets with d'Antin Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A boatman's stew of four freshwater fish in a white-wine sauce, from Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire. The fish stock is built from the heads and frames, thickened, and then used as the cooking liquid for the flesh itself, so nothing is wasted and the sauce carries the whole dish.

Take the fish out as it is doneThe instruction to boil fifteen minutes is the cooking time for the pot, not for any one piece. Eel wants the longest, pike and carp less, tench least; lift each piece the moment it is opaque and firm, or the thin slices will shred into the sauce.
The fish themselvesTench is effectively unobtainable in the United States and live carp and pike are regional at best. A workable substitute set is eel (still sold at Asian and Italian fishmongers), catfish, walleye or pickerel, and a firm white river fish. Keep the mix of textures rather than the exact species; the point is bone-rich, gelatinous fish that hold up to a fifteen-minute simmer.
Kneaded butterNo. 579 is beurre manié: soft butter and flour worked together raw, whisked into the simmering broth in small pinches. Ranhofer's seven or eight minutes of cooking is there to take the raw taste off the flour, and it should not be shortened.
Mushroom peelingsNineteenth-century kitchens turned mushrooms for garnish and kept the trimmings for stock. Stems, peelings, or a few dried mushrooms give the same effect; they go into the broth and are strained out with the bones.
Note This phrase is garbled or elliptical in the original text and almost certainly means lumps of butter of four ounces each, added off the fire to mount the reduced sauce. Four ounces per lump is a great deal for a household pot; treat it as an indication that the finished sauce is heavily buttered, and add butter to taste rather than by that figure.

A Little History

A matelote is a sailor's or boatman's stew — the word comes from matelot, and the dish is associated above all with the rivers rather than the sea, the Loire, the Seine, the Marne and the Saône, where innkeepers cooked whatever the nets brought up in wine from the nearest vineyard. The classic combination of eel, carp, pike and tench is the freshwater fisherman's catch, and eel is generally held to be indispensable: its gelatin is what gives the sauce body before any butter or flour is added. Matelotes are more often made with red wine; this white-wine version, closer to what is often called matelote à la marinière, produces a paler, sharper sauce finished with lemon. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, included it in The Epicurean (1894) among dozens of fish preparations, a reminder that an American luxury restaurant of the period still drew its working vocabulary directly from French provincial cooking, even when the fish in question would have had to come from the Hudson or the Great Lakes.