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Baked Perch, Soubise
Trim off fins, scale and wipe six fresh perch. Arrange on a lightly buttered tin. Season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper and squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon. Set in oven twenty minutes. Remove, pour a Soubise sauce over, sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese on top, reset in oven eight minutes. Remove and serve.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to make Soubise sauce and how hot your oven is. Both need filling in.
- Soubise sauceNot given here: it is a béchamel enriched with a large quantity of onion cooked soft in butter without browning, then sieved or blended smooth. Figure on roughly a cup and a half of sauce for six fish, thick enough to coat rather than run off.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive by modern taste for six small fish; halving it is worth considering.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. Use 400F for the initial twenty minutes and the same for the eight-minute finish, which is enough to set the cheese and lightly colour the sauce.
- Timing on the fishTwenty minutes suits whole pan-dressed perch of about half a pound each. Fillets are done in eight to ten minutes, so if you are using fillets, sauce them almost immediately and shorten the first bake accordingly.
- "On a lightly buttered tin"A shallow rimmed sheet pan or a gratin dish. The rim matters at the second stage, since the sauce will spread as it warms.
- TrimmingPerch have sharp, stiff dorsal spines and unusually adherent scales. Snip the fins off with kitchen shears before scaling, and scale under water or inside a bag to keep them from flying.
- CheeseGrate the Parmesan finely so it melts into the sauce in eight minutes rather than sitting on top as dry crumbs. A tablespoon or two per fish is enough; the point is a light glaze, not a crust.
- YieldSix fish serves three to six depending on size, with the sauce doing most of the work. Boiled or steamed potatoes suit it.
Soubise is one of the classical French mother-sauce derivatives, a béchamel loaded with puréed onion, and the name is generally traced to the 18th-century Prince de Soubise, whose kitchen was credited with it by later French cooks rather than by any contemporary record. Its pairing with a freshwater fish is telling: perch was cheap, abundant in American and European lakes and rivers, and slightly bland, exactly the sort of fish a rich onion sauce and a dusting of Parmesan were meant to lift.