No. 1230

Porgies, Paupiettes Hindostan (paupiettes de Porgies a l'Indostan

Remove the fillets and skin from the fish; pare to the size of one and three-quarters inches to four inches, and season with salt, nutmeg and pepper; then coat the flesh side with a thin layer of fish quenelle forcemeat (No. 90), to which has been added cooked fine herbs (No. 385). Roll them up into cork-shaped pieces and set them in buttered tin cylinders; lay these in a sautoir, moisten with mirepoix stock (No. 419), sprinkle over with butter, and set them in the oven for a few moments simply to stiffen the fish; remove, unmold, dip in egg, and roll in white bread-crumbs, then run an iron skewer through, and dip each one in melted butter, and broil them for fifteen to twenty minutes over a very low fire. Dress them on a stand made with rice and saffron, surround with sliced lemon, each slice being cut across in two, and serve separately an espagnole sauce (No. 414), mixed with curry and buttered with cayenne butter (No. 571).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Ranhofer construction piece: fish fillets lined with mousseline forcemeat, rolled, set in molds, crumbed and grilled. Most of the work is in the cross-references, which the original assumes you have at hand.

The fishPorgy (scup) is a small, lean, firm-fleshed Atlantic panfish still sold whole at many fish markets. Fillets from a one-pound porgy are small; black sea bass, snapper or branzino fillets take the treatment identically. Skin off, pin bones out, and pare to neat pieces of about 1 3/4 by 4 inches, as the original directs.
Quenelle forcemeat, in shortNo. 90 is Ranhofer's fish quenelle forcemeat, a pounded raw white-fish farce. A modern fish mousseline — white fish pounded with salt, bound with egg white and let down with cold cream, all kept over ice — stands in for it. A food processor does it in a minute; keep everything refrigerator-cold or the emulsion breaks. Spread it thin — a scant 1/8 inch — or the roll may burst as the forcemeat expands.
Fine herbs and mirepoix stockNo. 385 is a cooked fine-herbs mixture, typically chopped shallot, mushroom and parsley sweated in butter; cool it before it goes into the forcemeat, as warm herbs will slacken it. No. 419 is a stock built on a butter-cooked mirepoix of root vegetables and herbs (such preparations usually include ham or salt pork), moistened with white wine and broth. A well-made fish fumet with a splash of white wine stands in without loss.
Tin cylindersSmall straight-sided molds, essentially dariole or timbale molds, used to hold the roll's shape while it sets. Rings of buttered parchment, or a tight wrap of buttered foil, do the same job. The original asks only for "a few moments" in the oven — a brief spell in a moderate oven, only until the forcemeat firms enough to hold.
The broiling time is the problemThe broiling time -- Fifteen to twenty minutes, even over a very low fire, will likely overcook rolls of this size. The oven stage sets the forcemeat rather than cooking the fish through, so watch the grill closely: a few minutes, turned on the skewer, is usually enough to colour the crumbs and bring the fish to about 135–140F.
The sauceEspagnole (No. 414) is the brown mother sauce, veal stock thickened with brown roux and reduced with mirepoix and tomato. Whisk curry powder into it while it simmers so the spice loses its raw edge, then finish with cayenne butter (No. 571 — softened butter worked with cayenne). Work the butter in off the heat.
The rice standA "stand" here is a molded plinth of rice, cooked stiff with saffron and pressed into a shallow mold, that the paupiettes lean against upright. A firm pilaf of medium-grain rice, pressed into a buttered cake pan and turned out, gives the same effect; long-grain basmati holds together less readily.
YieldThe original gives no yield. Two porgies will give roughly four paupiettes; reckoning one and a half to two per person as a course, figure on nine to twelve rolls, and about 1 1/2 cups of sauce, for six at table.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years at Delmonico's, and this dish shows the house style at its most characteristic: a cheap local fish given the full French treatment. Porgy — scup, from the Narragansett mishcup — was one of the most abundant and least prestigious fish on the New York market, and is often said to have been sold by the barrel and fried whole. Turning it into paupiettes with quenelle forcemeat, skewered, crumbed and grilled, is precisely the sort of transformation that justified the bill. The "Hindostan" label marks the curry in the espagnole and the saffron in the rice, an Anglo-French convention of the period in which a single spice was enough to name a dish for a country; the sauce underneath remains an entirely classical French one. Curried fish had reached American hotel menus largely by way of British India and the Anglo-Indian cooking that came with it, and by the 1890s a curry-tinted brown sauce was probably familiar enough in a large restaurant kitchen to be no kind of novelty.