No. 1236

Red Snapper a la Princess

Red Snapper a la Princesse

Remove the skin from fillets of fish and cut them up into half inch thick slices; pare these into ovals, three and a half inches long by two and a quarter wide, season with salt and pepper. Lay on each oval a bed of mushroom puree (No. 722), and cover the whole with quenelle forcemeat (No. 90). Egg the surfaces, bestrew with bread-crumbs and a little parmesan, then set them in a lightly buttered sautoir; place this in the oven and when the fish is done, serve it with a separate princess sauce (No. 528).

SALMON (Saumon).

The salmon is a large fish, its weight reaching thirty pounds. The body is covered with scales, the meat is tender, thick, red colored and delicate, of an exquisite taste, but very difficult to digest. No fish has more than two pectorals, or two ventrals; may have several anals, and several dorsals; none, unless deformed or monstrous, has more than one caudal.

← No. 1235 Red Snapper a la Mobile (red Snapper a la Mo Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1237 Salmon a l'Argentine →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has purée, forcemeat and sauce standing by, so the entry reads as an assembly note rather than a recipe. Three components have to be made first, and the fish itself cooks in minutes.

The hinge: keep the fish thick and the coating thinRanhofer gives no time or temperature. Half-inch medallions of snapper will need only a few minutes in a moderate oven, and the forcemeat cap needs about that long to set. If the forcemeat is piled on thickly the fish overcooks before the mousseline is firm; a thin layer over the mushroom puree keeps the two in step.
SautoirA straight-sided, shallow pan with a flat bottom, ovenproof. Any low-sided skillet or a shallow baking dish that just holds the ovals without crowding will do. There is no liquid in the pan, so the pieces would slide and dry if they had room to spread.
Oven heatRanhofer gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, is right here; anything hotter browns the crumb and parmesan before the forcemeat is cooked.
Quenelle forcemeat (No. 90)One of Ranhofer's numbered quenelle forcemeats: pounded fish or meat, bound and lightened, in the manner of a mousseline. A modern food-processor mousseline of white fish, egg white and cold heavy cream, seasoned and kept ice-cold, does the same job in a fraction of the time.
Mushroom puree (No. 722)Finely chopped mushrooms cooked down with butter until dry, then bound. It must be thick and cold when it goes on, or it will weep under the forcemeat and slacken the whole assembly.
Princess sauce (No. 528)A white sauce in Ranhofer's system, of the velouty family; the name is conventionally linked to asparagus. Sent to the table separately, as the recipe specifies, so it does not soften the crumbed surface.
Cutting the ovalsThree and a half by two and a quarter inches, half an inch thick, gives a modest medallion of a couple of ounces. A fish large enough to yield fillets of that thickness will give several such pieces; the trim goes into the forcemeat rather than the bin.
Fish substitutionsAny firm white fillet thick enough to cut into half-inch slabs, such as grouper, black bass or halibut, behaves the same way under a forcemeat.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system set down in print, which is why so many entries are one paragraph of assembly resting on a scaffold of numbered cross-references. The dish is a French construction applied to an American fish: red snapper came up from the Gulf on ice to eastern markets in the later nineteenth century and appears throughout this section, treated with the same garnitures a Paris kitchen would have given sole or turbot. Names like a la Princesse generally denote the garnish rather than any person; in nineteenth-century French practice the term is associated with asparagus, and Ranhofer's princess sauce follows that convention. The odd block of natural history about salmon and fish fins that follows the recipe is not a mistake of transcription but a feature of the book, which interleaves market notes and zoological description between its formulas.