No. 1283

Spotted Fish, English Style-Fillets

Filets de Spotted Fish a l'Anglaise

Raise the fillets from three small spotted fish, each one weighing from three-quarters to one pound; pare and season them with salt, oil, lemon juice and branches of parsley, leaving them marinate in this for half an hour. Drain, cut shapely, and dip them in beaten eggs, roll in fresh bread-crumbs and finally immerse in melted butter; broil the fillets a quarter of an hour, turning them over when done. Serve with a hot horseradish sauce (No. 478) or a melted maitre d'hotel (No. 581).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's à l'anglaise is simply the egg-and-crumb treatment, and the recipe is sound apart from its broiling time, which belongs to a coal-fired broiler with the grate set well away from the fire.

The timing is the hingeA quarter of an hour will dry out fillets taken from a fish under a pound; those are thin pieces, perhaps half an inch at the shoulder. Under a hot broiler they want three to five minutes total, turned once, and are done when the flesh just parts.
What "spotted fish" meansRanhofer most likely means spotted weakfish, the speckled sea trout of the Atlantic coast, though the book does not gloss the name. Any lean white-fleshed fillet of similar thickness takes the treatment — sea trout, snapper, small striped bass, black sea bass.
The marinadeSalt, oil, lemon and parsley for half an hour is a seasoning step, not a cure. Longer than that and the acid begins to firm the surface of the flesh, which works against the crisp crumb.
Crumb, then butterThe order is deliberate: egg, then dry crumbs, then a dip in melted butter. The butter is what browns the coating under a broiler, where there is no frying fat. Let the coated fillets rest ten minutes before cooking so the crust sets.
Fresh bread-crumbsThese are soft crumbs grated from a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy commercial kind and not panko. They brown faster and burn faster; keep the fillets four to five inches from the element.
The cross-referencesNo. 478 and No. 581 are Ranhofer's own sauces elsewhere in the book — a hot horseradish sauce and a maître d'hôtel butter, the latter being butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then melted. The butter is the easier of the two and needs no separate recipe.
YieldThree fish give six fillets, which serves three as a main course or six as a fish course in the manner of the period.

A Little History

À l'anglaise in a nineteenth-century French kitchen vocabulary meant food passed through egg and crumbs and cooked plainly — the classification tells a cook the method before it tells him the fish. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, organised his fish chapters by species and then gave each one a run of numbered preparations in different national styles, so that a single market fish could be sent out a dozen ways. The presence of American market fish under French headings is the whole character of the book: spotted weakfish, pompano and red snapper came to the New York market and were dressed in the grammar of Carême and his successors. The horseradish sauce offered as an alternative is the English half of the dish showing through, horseradish being a familiar English accompaniment to plainly cooked beef and, less commonly, to fish.