No. 1260

Sheepshead a la Meissonier

Blanch separately one ounce of parsley root, one ounce of celery knob root, two ounces of mushrooms, two ounces of the white of leeks, all cut in fine strips, and minced onions, also blanched separately. Put three ounces of butter into a saucepan on the fire, and when hot place therein the onions, leeks, mushroom, parsley and celery roots, and fry without browning. Moisten with white wine and fish stock (No. 417). Lift the fillets from the fish, pare them neatly, and lay them in a deep buttered dish, the skin part downward; pour over the prepared stock, and cover over with another dish, then cook in the oven for fifteen to twenty minutes. Put into a saucepan, one pint of veloute (No. 415), boil, and reduce it with the stock to the consistency of a light sauce, add the vegetables, dress the fish, pour the sauce and the roots over, and bestrew the whole with very green, chopped parsley.

← No. 1259 Sheepshead a la Buena Vista Pompano, Snapper & Other Fish No. 1261 Sheepshead, Cardinal Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic braise-and-nappe: fish fillets cooked in a covered dish with an aromatic julienne, the cooking liquor then folded into a velouté. Ranhofer assumes you have stock and sauce already on hand, so most of the work is upstream.

The hinge: reduce the liquor, not the sauce aloneThe cooking liquid from the fish is boiled down together with the velouté until it reaches, in Ranhofer's words, 'the consistency of a light sauce.' Skipping that step leaves a thin sauce with no fish character.
Sheepshead and substitutesAtlantic sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus) is a firm, sweet porgy relative, still fished in the Gulf and South Atlantic but rarely sold north of that. Black sea bass, porgy, snapper or striped bass fillets behave the same way.
Celery knob rootThis is celeriac, sold as celery root. Parsley root is the pale, parsnip-shaped root of Hamburg parsley; if unavailable, a small parsnip plus extra parsley gives a near approximation.
Blanch separately, and whyThe recipe gives no reason, but blanching each vegetable on its own allows for the different rates at which they soften. A couple of minutes in boiling salted water, then drain well before they go into the butter.
Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a covered dish of this sort.
TimingFifteen to twenty minutes suits the thick fillets of a large fish. Modern fillets of an inch or less are done in 10 to 12 minutes, at an internal temperature of about 130-135F; held longer they go dry and chalky.
The two prerequisite recipesNo. 417 is the book's fish stock and No. 415 its velouté; both must be made in advance. A pint of velouté is called for as the base.
Butter and quantitiesThree ounces of butter for six ounces of listed vegetables, plus an unspecified quantity of minced onion, is generous by current practice; less will sweat them adequately. Keep the heat low, since the recipe insists on frying without browning.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is full of dishes named for the celebrated figures of the day. Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) was the French painter of small, minutely detailed military and historical scenes, immensely fashionable and immensely expensive among American collectors in exactly the decades Ranhofer was cooking; naming a dish for him was a compliment to the patrons who bought such pictures as much as to the painter. The treatment itself is straightforwardly French: fillets braised under a cover with a fine julienne of root vegetables, the liquor worked into a velouté. Sheepshead was a staple of New York markets in the nineteenth century, abundant enough to give its name to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and Ranhofer devotes a long run of numbered recipes to it before local stocks thinned and it slipped out of northern kitchens.