No. 1225

Pompano a la Potentini

Split three fish, each weighting a pound and a half, lengthwise down the spinal bone; leave the skin on the meats, season with salt, coat over with oil, and roll them in white bread-crumbs; broil for fifteen to twenty minutes over a slow fire, turning them over when half done. Dress them on a dish, pour over slightly melted lobster butter (No. 580) thickened with veloute sauce (No. 415); add the juice of a lemon and chopped parsley; garnish around the fish with sliced fresh cucumbers, laid in salt for fifteen minutes, and all the liquid extracted, then seasoned with pepper, vinegar, and oil, as well as some finely chopped chervil.

← No. 1224 Pompano a la Mazarin Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1226 Pompano a la Soya →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward broiled fish dressed with two classical compound preparations. The main work is upstream: lobster butter and velouté are separate recipes in Ranhofer's book, and the dish stands or falls on them.

The timing is the thingFifteen to twenty minutes suits split whole fish laid over a slow charcoal fire, well back from the coals. Under a modern gas or electric broiler, or on a hot grill, split pompano halves of this size cook in roughly 8 to 12 minutes total, turned once. Go by the flesh at the backbone: opaque and just separating.
"Split lengthwise down the spinal bone"Not filleting. The fish is butterflied through the backbone into two skin-on halves, each still carrying its bones. Three fish at 1.5 lb yields six pieces, which serves six as a course or three or four as a main.
Crumbs under the broilerOiled white breadcrumbs scorch fast at close range. Keep the fish 6 to 8 inches from the element, or finish in a 400F oven if the crumbs colour before the fish is through.
Lobster butter (No. 580)A compound butter of the usual kind: lobster shells and coral pounded with butter, gently melted and strained. Ranhofer gives his own method at No. 580 and it is worth checking. Any modern shellfish butter made the same way works; the coral is what supplies much of the colour, so a hen lobster is worth seeking. It is a finishing butter and should be warmed, not boiled.
Velouté (No. 415)Veloute (No. 415) -- a blond roux slackened with white stock; consult Ranhofer's No. 415 for the stock he specifies. Its role here is only to give the lobster butter enough body to coat -- a few spoonfuls, not a heavy sauce.
The sauce will break if pushedMelted butter thickened with velouté and then acidulated with a whole lemon's juice is fragile. Combine off direct heat, add the lemon last, and serve at once.
Salting the cucumbersFifteen minutes in salt, then pressed dry, is exactly right and still standard practice. Skip it and the dressing dilutes into water on the plate.
ChervilRarely stocked and short-lived once cut. Flat parsley with a small amount of tarragon approximates its anise note; do not substitute dried.
PompanoFlorida pompano remains available but is expensive and often sold whole at 1 to 2 lb, which is the size called for. Small snapper, black bass or trout of similar weight take the same treatment.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that kitchen laid out as a numbered reference system, which is why this page sends you off to No. 580 and No. 415 rather than repeating them. Pompano appears repeatedly in the book; by the later nineteenth century iced rail shipment was bringing Gulf and southern fish north, and a delicate warm-water fish arriving fresh in Manhattan was precisely the kind of luxury a restaurant of that rank was selling. The suffixed names "a la Mazarin", "a la Soya", "a la Potentini" follow the French convention of dedicating a garnish to a person or place; Potentini is not a name with any well-documented culinary figure attached. What identifies the dish is not the name but the pairing of a crumbed broiled fish with lobster butter, putting the flavour of one shellfish at the service of another fish entirely.