No. 2528

Kingfish Fillets a la Valencay

Filets de Kingfish a la Valencay

Pare oblong shape and cook ten to twelve small fillets of kingfish in a sautoir with white wine court-bouillon (No. 39); drain and let cool under a weight; trim them nicely, dip them singly into a white chaudfroid sauce (No. 596), ranging them immediately on to a baking sheet to cool off the sauce, then pare off the surplus of it. Decorate a third part of them on the smooth side with fanciful cuts of truffles or gherkins; cover them over with half-set jelly applied with a brush, and let this get cold, then dress them on an inch-high socle in pyramid form. placing the decorated ones on top. On one side fasten a hatelet garnished with shrimps. Uphold the fillets of fish on both sides with thick chopped jelly pushed through a cornet and surround, both right and left, with five or six large crawfish bodies, emptied and refilled with a salpicon of crawfish or lobster tails, combined with a salad of small vegetables dressed with mayonnaise (No. 606). Stand these bodies upright to form a half circle, and brush over with half-set jelly; surround the base of the dish with fine jelly croutons (No. 2442), and serve with a sauce-boat of mayonnaise sauce (No. 606).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cold buffet showpiece from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, built in stages: poach, chill, coat, decorate, assemble. Nothing in it is difficult, but the order and the temperature of the jelly at each step decide whether it works.

The hinge: jelly at the right setThe finishing jelly is twice specified as "half-set" — syrupy and just beginning to thicken (the chaudfroid likewise wants to be fluid but not hot when the fillets are dipped). Warmer and it runs off the fish; colder and it goes lumpy and cannot be brushed smooth. Keep a bowl of it over cool water and stir it back to fluid as needed.
KingfishThis is the northern kingfish (a small Atlantic drum, once cheap and abundant in New York markets), not the tropical king mackerel sold under the same name today. Any firm, fine-grained white fish that holds its shape when poached will stand in; ten to twelve small fillets suggests portions of two to three ounces each.
Poaching timeRanhofer gives none. Thin fillets in a barely trembling court-bouillon are done in four to six minutes — they should be just opaque. Overcooked fish will crack when you trim it and will not take a clean coat of sauce.
Sautoir, socle, hatelet, cornetA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan; use a wide sauté pan or skillet. The socle is a low pedestal — originally carved rice paste or semolina, and a plain block or an inverted shallow dish works. A hatelet is a decorative skewer, and a cornet is a paper piping cone.
Cooling under a weightDrain the fillets, lay them flat, and set a tray with a light weight on top while they chill. This flattens them so the chaudfroid coats evenly, and it is why the finished fillets stack into a pyramid without sliding.
Crawfish bodiesThe shells are hollowed out and used as cups. Buy whole crawfish, pick the tail meat for the salpicon, and reserve the largest, most intact head-shells; six large ones is optimistic from a small batch, so allow extra.
Mayonnaise and holdingThe accompanying mayonnaise is raw-egg; use pasteurized eggs if the dish will sit out. An aspic-coated platter of fish and shellfish should not stand at room temperature more than about two hours — assemble it cold and keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes to table.
YieldNo yield is given. Ten to twelve small fillets plus the crawfish garnish would serve roughly six as a cold course, or work as one dish on a larger buffet.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry belongs to its long chapter of cold buffet set-pieces — food built upward on pedestals, glazed with aspic, and decorated with cut truffle, meant to be looked at as much as eaten. Dishes styled à la Valençay take their name from the château of Valençay, the estate of Talleyrand, in whose household Carême worked; as with most nineteenth-century garnish names, the connection is one of homage and convention rather than a documented origin, and the label signals a style of presentation more than a fixed set of ingredients. The kingfish itself is the local touch: a modest, plentiful fish off the mid-Atlantic coast that Ranhofer treats with the full apparatus of French cuisine froide, which is much of what The Epicurean is about — American market fish and shellfish dressed in the grammar of the Paris kitchen.