No. 1234

Red Snapper a la Demidoff

Keep the fillets whole while taking them from the fish; remove the skin, pare and cut them up into bias slices, trim these giving them an oval shape, then season and cover the surface with a cream forcemeat (No. 76). Decorate the tops with truffles, range them in a buttered sautoir, and moisten with fish stock (No. 195); cover over with buttered paper, and let cook in a slack oven. Reduce the stock with an equal quantity of veloute sauce (No. 415); garnish around the fish with oysters from which the hard parts have been removed, small lobster rissolettes made as in No 956, and very green parsley leaves on each end. Serve the sauce in a separate sauce-boat.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A Ranhofer cross-reference recipe: almost everything hangs on components numbered elsewhere in The Epicurean. Once those are decoded it is a straightforward low-oven braise of fish medallions under a mousseline coating.

The hinge: a slack oven"slack" means a low, cooling oven; in modern terms somewhere around 275-325F, though the term was never precise. It matters more here than anywhere else in the recipe. The cream forcemeat is an egg-white-and-cream mousseline that will curdle and weep if driven hard; figure roughly 10-14 minutes at that temperature, until the coating is just set.
Cream forcemeat (No. 76)A mousseline-type forcemeat: raw flesh (fish, for this dish) pounded to a paste with egg white, seasoned, then let down with heavy cream over ice. A food processor does the pounding in a minute. Keep everything cold and add the cream in stages or it breaks.
SautoirA shallow pan with straight sides, not a deep casserole. Any wide sauté pan or oven-safe skillet works; the point is that the medallions sit in a single layer in a thin film of stock rather than swimming.
Buttered paperA cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the forcemeat from drying without steaming it into a pudding, so do not substitute a tight lid or foil.
Fish velouté (No. 415)Velouté (No. 415) -- White stock thickened with a blond roux. Reduce the braising liquid, then combine with an equal volume of velouté as directed and strain. A finishing swirl of butter is in keeping with the period.
Truffles and rissolettesThe truffle decoration is thin rounds or cut shapes pressed onto the forcemeat before cooking; a single small preserved truffle goes a long way, and the dish survives without it. The lobster rissolettes of No. 956 are small fried pastry croquettes and are an afternoon's work on their own — many cooks will drop them.
The oysters"Hard parts" means the tough adductor muscle. If you poach them, give them under two minutes in their own liquor until the edges just ruffle; longer cooking turns them to rubber.
YieldNo quantity is given. Two snapper fillets from a 3-4 lb fish cut into bias medallions serve four as a first course, or two generously as a main.

A Little History

The garnish name honors the Demidoffs, the Russian mining-fortune family whose Paris-based members — Anatole in particular — were fixtures of nineteenth-century French society and lent their name to a run of luxurious dishes, the best known being the truffle-and-root-vegetable poularde Demidoff. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, took that Franco-Russian repertoire and grafted it onto Gulf fish: red snapper gets the full Parisian treatment of mousseline forcemeat, truffle inlay, and a separate sauce-boat of velouté. The book's numbered cross-references are not laziness but the working logic of a brigade kitchen, where forcemeat, fish stock, and velouté were standing preparations that any cook on the line could draw from rather than build to order.