No. 1264

Skate, with Hazelnut or Black Butter

Raie au Beurre Noisette ou Noir

Cut the fish up into three parts, the two wings and the body; each wing into three parts and the body into two, making eight parts in all. Suppress the head and tail, empty it from the belly side, reserving the liver. Plunge the pieces of skate into boiling water until the skin will detach when scraping it off with a knife. After all the pieces are well cleansed soak them for one hour in cold water. Boil some water in a saucepan, add to it minced roots and onions, aromatic herbs, a bunch of parsley, salt and three gills of vinegar; let this boil for ten minutes, then throw in the skate and the liver, cover over when it begins to boil, set it on one side to poach merely, without boiling; a quarter of an hour later drain and dry all the moisture on a cloth. Dress the fish on a dish with the liver sliced, cover it liberally with hazelnut butter (No. 567) or else black butter (No. 565), or a sharp sauce (No. 538).

← No. 1263 Skate a la Lechartier Eels, Pike, Carp & Sturgeon No. 1265 Smelts a l'Alexandria →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you are buying a whole small skate and butchering it yourself. Working from trimmed wings, which is all most fishmongers sell, cuts out the first half of the instructions and changes the timing.

Three gills of vinegarA gill is half a cup, so this is about 1 1/2 cups of vinegar in the poaching liquid. That is a deliberately sharp court bouillon: the acid firms the flesh and suppresses the faint ammonia note skate develops as it ages.
"Minced roots"Probably carrot, parsnip and celery root, sliced thin. "Aromatic herbs" would usually mean thyme and bay; the recipe lists the bunch of parsley separately from them.
Poach, never boilThis is the hinge. Once the pot returns to a simmer it is pulled to the side of the stove and held below boiling. Skate is cartilage and fine muscle fibre in sheets, and a rolling boil shreds the wing off the cartilage into a mess.
A quarter of an hour is for whole-fish piecesFifteen minutes suits the thick butt end of a wing cut on the bone. Trimmed wings 3/4 inch thick are done in 8 to 10 minutes at a bare shiver, when the flesh slips cleanly from the cartilage.
SkinningThe brief plunge into boiling water loosens the skin so it scrapes off with the back of a knife. Wings sold ready-skinned skip this and the hour-long cold soak, though a 20-minute soak in cold water still does no harm.
The liverSkate liver is rich and excellent, and now rarely available, since the fish is usually landed gutted. Omit it rather than substitute; nothing else behaves the same way.
Beurre noisette and beurre noirHazelnut butter is butter cooked to the colour and smell of hazelnuts, which happens fast and then burns. Black butter is taken further and is usually finished with vinegar, often with capers and parsley; Ranhofer's own versions are the cross-referenced Nos. 565 and 567, not given here. It goes over the fish hot.
YieldA skate of a size to give eight pieces would probably serve four to six as a main course. Serve on a warmed dish; the butter congeals on cold china.

A Little History

Raie au beurre noir is one of the durable dishes of the French bourgeois table, built on the fact that skate is cheap, boneless in the useful sense, and firm enough to survive a wet cooking method. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, put it in The Epicurean (1894) in the section headed Eels, Pike, Carp & Sturgeon, a grouping of strong-flavoured or cartilaginous fish given an acidulated court bouillon and an assertive sauce rather than the handling given to sole and bass. The reserved liver marks the recipe as belonging to a kitchen that received whole fish; it is still eaten in France where the fish is landed ungutted, but has largely vanished from Anglophone cooking. Skate also has a chemical peculiarity behind all the soaking and vinegar: like other cartilaginous fish it carries urea in its tissues, which breaks down to ammonia after death, hence the emphasis on freshness and on sharp treatment.