No. 1210

Perch, Stuffed and Baked

Perche Farcie au Four

Split the perch through the whole length of the back, keeping on the head and tail bone; suppress the large spinal bone and fins. Season the inside and fill the space with a fish forcemeat (No. 76) and cooked fine herbs (No. 385). Set the perch on a buttered dish, season with salt and pepper, and pour over white wine and mushroom essence (No. 392); let it cook for twenty minutes in a moderately heated oven, then drain and reduce the gravy, mixing it in with a Spanish sauce (No. 414), when the sauce is ready, incorporate into it some butter, lemon-juice and chopped parsley; dress the fish and cover with the sauce.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stocked larder, so half this recipe lives in cross-references to other numbered entries. Reading it as a method rather than a shopping list makes it tractable.

Boning the perchCutting through the back and lifting out the spine while leaving head and tail attached gives a cavity for stuffing and keeps the fish in one piece. Perch have sharp spiny dorsal fins and rough scales, so it is worth scaling and trimming the fins before you start, working from tail to head.
The cross-referenced preparationsNo. 76 is a fish forcemeat (a modern fish mousseline of white fish, egg white and cream stands in). No. 385 is cooked fine herbs, a herb-and-aromatic preparation stewed in butter. No. 392 is mushroom essence, the reduced strained liquor from cooking mushrooms.
Spanish sauceNo. 414 is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on brown roux, veal stock and mirepoix over many hours. In a fish dish it is used only as a small binding and enriching addition to the reduced pan gravy; a well-reduced brown stock or demi-glace serves the same purpose.
Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "a moderately heated oven," with no figure given; a moderate modern oven is the sensible reading. Twenty minutes suits a stuffed fish of roughly a pound to a pound and a half; the flesh at the thickest point should just flake and the forcemeat should read 145F.
Don't overfillFish forcemeat expands as the egg sets. Pack the cavity loosely and level, or it will split the fish open and leak into the wine as it bakes.
Finishing the sauceThe butter, lemon juice and parsley go in off the heat, swirled rather than boiled. Once mounted with butter the sauce will break if it returns to a simmer, and the lemon is there to cut the espagnole, so add it last and taste.
Wine and dish"Pour over white wine" is unquantified; enough to come a quarter of the way up the fish in a buttered gratin dish is the intent, since it must reduce to a few spoonfuls of gravy. A dry, unoaked white works best.
YieldThe original gives no yield. One stuffed perch of this size would likely serve two as a main course, or more as one course of a longer menu of the kind Ranhofer was writing for.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and its structure — several thousand numbered entries, each leaning on the others — reflects a professional kitchen where the sauces, forcemeats and essences were standing preparations made daily rather than things assembled for a single dish. Perch here most likely means the freshwater yellow perch of American lakes and rivers, and Ranhofer gives it several treatments alongside eel, pike and carp, all of them river fish that a French-trained chef would have known in their European forms. The technique of splitting a small fish along the back, removing the spine and stuffing it with a pounded forcemeat of another fish is standard nineteenth-century French practice, valued because it makes a modest fish look substantial and eat richly. The name given in French with an English gloss is typical of the book, which was aimed at American cooks and stewards expected to reproduce a Delmonico's carte.