No. 1213

Pike Perch or Wall Eyed Pike a la Durance

Sandre a la Durance

Split a one-pound pike perch in two, through the middle of the back, and take out the spinal bone lay this boned fish on a buttered dish and moisten with mushroom stock, and white wine; season with salt and pepper, laying small pieces of butter on top; let boil up once, then place the dish in the oven covered with another smaller one, and cook for fifteen minutes; drain off the stock, thicken it with a little butter mixed with an equal quantity of flour (Kneaded butter). Dress the fish, strain the sauce through a tammy, and when ready to serve add to it a good sized piece of butter, the juice of a lemon, and fine herbs. Cover over with a third part of the sauce, and garnish around with the following smelt fillets: Place fillets of smelts on a table to season; cover the cut sides with a layer of raw fish forcemeat (No. 76), mixed with chopped mushrooms, fold over the fillets so that the forcemeat is enclosed, then roll them in flour and dip in beaten eggs; plunge a few at the time into very hot frying fat to become a fine color, while cooking, then drain and salt. Dress these around the fish, serving the remainder of the sauce in a separate sauce-boat.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A braise à l'étuvée in all but name: the fish cooks in a shallow buttered dish under an inverted second dish, and its own liquor becomes the sauce. Everything hinges on not overcooking a one-pound fish.

Oven heatThe recipe specifies no temperature; a moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, suits the method. Fifteen minutes suits a whole one-pound walleye split flat; check at ten. The flesh should just set at the thickest point, around 130-135F, since it carries over under the covering dish.
The covering dishAn inverted plate or shallow dish over the fish traps steam and keeps the top from drying — the nineteenth-century version of a parchment cartouche. Foil works but gives a slacker seal; a lid or plate that sits close to the fish is better.
Mushroom stockNot a canned broth. It is the strained liquor from cooking mushrooms in water with butter and lemon, reduced and salted lightly. Half a cup of it with half a cup of dry white wine is enough to moisten a fish this size without drowning the sauce.
Kneaded butterBeurre manié, equal weights soft butter and flour worked to a paste. Whisk it into the hot, not boiling, strained cooking liquor in pea-sized bits; a rounded tablespoon of paste will bind about a cup of liquid. Boil it briefly to lose the raw flour, then finish off the heat with the final butter and lemon so it does not break.
TammyA tammy cloth is a fine worsted straining cloth. A chinois or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin does the same job.
Forcemeat No. 76The reference is Ranhofer's raw fish forcemeat, a pounded lean white fish preparation. A modern mousseline of pike, whiting or sole blitzed with egg white and cold cream is the working equivalent; keep everything ice-cold or it will curdle.
SmeltsWhole smelts commonly run about 4-8 inches and are sold frozen in many markets; filleting them is fiddly but they are meant to be a garnish, not a course. Six to eight stuffed fillets are plenty. Fry at 350-375F for about two minutes, until the coating colors — the forcemeat inside sets almost immediately.
Fine herbsFines herbes: chervil, chives, parsley and tarragon, chopped and added at the last moment so they stay green.
YieldA one-pound fish with its garnish serves two as a main course, or four in a longer menu of the kind this book was written for.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down at length. "Sandre" is the French name for zander, the European pike-perch; American cooks reading the book would have used walleye, which is close enough in flesh and firmness that Ranhofer treats them as one fish throughout this section. The Durance is a river in Provence, and garnish names of this sort in nineteenth-century French cooking were often decorative rather than strictly regional — a way of distinguishing one buttered white-wine treatment of a fish from the dozen others in the same chapter. What dates the dish is not the fish but the structure: a small braise, a liquor thickened with beurre manié and mounted with more butter, and a border of fried stuffed smelts made from a second forcemeat entirely. That layering of one preparation around another is the mark of a brigade kitchen with cooks to spare.