No. 1235

Red Snapper a la Mobile (red Snapper a la Mobile

Pare the fillets lifted from a fish, suppress the skin, and cut them up into half heart-shaped pieces; make an incision on one side, and fill this with a forcemeat prepared as follows: Fry colorless in butter some shallots, mushrooms, chives, and parsley; add to it a tomato puree (No. 730), season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and mix in a little bechamel sauce (No. 409). Lay the fish on a buttered dish, and cover with a Chivry sauce (No. 449).

← No. 1234 Red Snapper a la Demidoff Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1236 Red Snapper a la Princess →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a kitchen that already has the sauces standing ready, so this entry is really an assembly note. The gaps worth filling are the cross-referenced sauces and the fact that no cooking method or time is given at all.

The missing instructionThe recipe never says to cook the fish. "Lay the fish on a buttered dish, and cover with a Chivry sauce" leaves the cooking unstated; the stuffed fillets have to be cooked through somehow before saucing, and baking them in the buttered dish is the obvious reading, though Ranhofer gives no method, temperature or time. Snapper fillets of ordinary thickness need roughly 8 to 12 minutes in a moderate oven; they are done when the flesh has just turned opaque and separates into flakes.
The three cross-referencesNo. 730 is a plain reduced tomato purée; No. 409 is béchamel; No. 449 is Chivry sauce, a velouté or béchamel finished with Chivry butter — shallot, chervil, tarragon, chives and burnet pounded into butter — usually with a splash of white wine reduced first. A good herbed white sauce built on fish stock, or a béchamel beaten with soft herb butter off the heat, is the working equivalent.
"Suppress the skin"Nineteenth-century kitchen English for remove it. Skin the fillets and pull the pin bones before shaping.
Shaping and stuffing"Half heart-shaped pieces" is best read as portions trimmed to a rounded wedge, one straight edge and one curved. The recipe says only "make an incision on one side"; the practical reading is a pocket cut into the thickest edge rather than a cut through the fillet. Fill it lightly; the forcemeat expands very little and an overfull pocket will split.
Get the forcemeat dryFry the shallots, mushrooms, chives and parsley in butter without letting them colour, then cook the tomato purée down until it holds its shape on the spoon before adding the béchamel. A wet stuffing will leak into the dish and thin the sauce.
NutmegFreshly grated, and a scrape rather than a spoonful. The quantity is left open, as it is for the salt and pepper.
The fishGulf red snapper is expensive and often substituted for at market. Any firm white fillet of similar thickness behaves the same way here — grouper, black sea bass, striped bass. Avoid thin flatfish fillets, which cannot take a pocket.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or number of portions. Reckon on one fillet per person, so a 2 to 2 1/2 lb whole snapper will serve two, and allow about 1/2 cup of sauce per portion. In Ranhofer's multi-course service the portion would have been smaller than a modern main course, so as a main dish this wants a starch alongside.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its long run of red snapper recipes — Demidoff, Princess, Mobile and a dozen more — reflects something specific about the period: refrigerated rail cars and iced shipping had made Gulf fish a reliable New York luxury. Red snapper came north from the Gulf ports — Pensacola's snapper fleet was the largest, with Mobile among the other Gulf shipping points — so "à la Mobile" reads less as a Creole dish than as a French kitchen naming the fish's home port, in the same way "à la Marseillaise" or "à la Normande" name a place rather than a recipe lineage. The treatment itself is entirely Parisian: a stuffed fillet under Chivry sauce, a herb-butter velouté whose name is of uncertain origin, belonging to the classical family of green herb sauces. Ranhofer's habit of numbering and cross-referencing every component is the mark of a brigade cookbook — the sauces existed in quantity down the line, and the chef de partie needed only the assembly.