No. 417

Fish Stock for Lean Espagnole and Veloute Sauce

Fond de Poisson pour Sauce Espagnole et Sauce Veloutee en Maigre

Butter the bottom of a sixteen-quart thick bottomed saucepan, and cover it with a layer of sliced onions, and on top of these four pounds of bony fish or else fish bones cut into pieces; moisten with one pint of water and set it on a brisk fire, covering the saucepan, and let it reduce to a glaze. Moisten again with one pint of white wine and four quarts of boiling water; skim off the fat and add a bunch of parsley garnished with two bay leaves, as much thyme, and half a pound of minced carrots and four ounces of celery, two cloves of garlic, and then let cook slowly for two hours; strain the whole through a fine sieve and use this stock for diluting the roux.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic fish fumet built on the old technique of sweating bones down to a glaze before wetting them. Two details need attention: the scale, and the cooking time.

Cut the batch downSixteen quarts of pan, four pounds of bones and four quarts of water is restaurant volume. Quartering it — one pound of bones, one quart of water, a splash of wine — fits a 4-quart saucepan and gives somewhat under a quart of finished stock.
Two hours is far too longModern practice takes fish bones off the heat at 20 to 30 minutes. Beyond that the fine bones give up glue and bitterness and the delicate aroma cooks away; a long-simmered fish stock turns cloudy and faintly sour. This is the hinge of the recipe.
Which bonesUse lean white fish: sole, turbot, halibut, whiting, snapper, cod frames. Salmon, mackerel, sardine and other oily fish make the stock rancid-tasting. Remove gills and any blood, and rinse the frames well — both are the main source of bitterness and cloudiness.
"Reduce to a glaze"The pint of water and the juices from the bones cook off until the pan bottom is filmed and just beginning to catch. Concentration without colour — keep the heat under control so the onions stay pale.
"En maigre"Lean, in the church sense: made without meat for fast days. The stock is meant to replace veal stock in Espagnole and Velouté, so it goes into the roux exactly where the meat stock would.
Skim, and do not stirSkim as soon as the boiling water goes in and keep the pot at a bare tremble. Stirring or a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and fine particles and the stock will never clear.
No saltClassical stocks of this kind are generally left unsalted, since they get reduced into sauces afterwards. Season the finished sauce, not the fumet.
Yield and keepingExpect appreciably less than the four quarts of water that go in, and proportionally less from a quarter batch. Fish stock keeps two days refrigerated and freezes well — reduce it to a glaze in ice-cube trays if space is short.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the classical French system he brought with him: a numbered library of foundation stocks, each one feeding the sauces that follow it. The label en maigre — lean — belongs to the Catholic calendar rather than to dietetics; grand hotels and restaurants of the period needed a full parallel repertoire of sauces for Fridays and for Lent, which meant a fish-based substitute for the veal stock that ordinarily thinned an Espagnole or a Velouté. The technique of sweating the bones on butter and onion down to a glaze before adding wine and water is standard for a fumet and is generally traced to the same nineteenth-century codification, through Carême and his successors, that gave the mother sauces their names. What stands out is the clock: short fish fumets were already usual in the classical repertoire, which makes Ranhofer's long extraction notable rather than typical of his era.