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Baked Weakfish, Venitienne
Place in a mortar three sound, peeled shallots, a half bean sound garlic, four branches well-washed parsley, two branches chervil and ten branches chives; thoroughly pound three minutes, then add one ounce good butter and juice of half a sound lemon, pound again till well amalgamated, then press through a sieve into a bowl. Scale, trim fins and cut off head of a very fresh three-pound weakfish, split in two remove spinal bone, season all around with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and lay on a lightly buttered tin cut side up. Evenly spread green butter over surface of the halves, then set in oven to bake for thirty-five minutes, being careful to baste frequently with the butter, remove, dress on a dish, pour butter over and serve.
A split fish under an herb butter, from a period when fish was routinely baked twice as long as we would now bake it. The timing is the thing to fix; the rest is straightforward.
- Cut the baking timeA 3-lb weakfish split into two flat halves is thin, and thirty-five minutes will leave it dry and chalky. Bake until the flesh is just opaque and flakes at the thickest point, about 15-20 minutes, or 145F on an instant-read thermometer.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot-but-not-fierce oven, 400F, suits a flat fillet basted with butter; it colours the herb butter without scorching the garlic.
- "Half bean" garlicA piece about half the size of a bean, i.e. less than one small clove. The green butter is meant to taste of shallot, parsley and chives, with garlic in the background.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is a scant three-quarters teaspoon of pepper for a whole fish. That is a lot of pepper by modern habit; half is plenty.
- Mortar and sieveA small food processor does the pounding in seconds, and if you chop the herbs fine first you can skip sieving altogether. The sieving exists only to remove shallot fibre and give a smooth spreadable paste.
- Butter quantityOne ounce (2 tablespoons) is barely enough to both coat the fish and provide basting liquid. Double it if you want something to pour over at the table, as the last line directs.
- ChervilStill sold fresh in some markets but often unavailable; dried chervil is close to worthless. Use a little tarragon plus extra parsley, which gives the same faintly aniseed lift.
- The fishWeakfish (also sold as sea trout or squeteague) is an Atlantic fish that comes and goes from the market. Any firm-fleshed round fish of similar size works: striped bass, black sea bass, branzino scaled up, or a couple of smaller fish.
- YieldA 3-lb whole fish, headed and boned, feeds three, or two generously.
The dish is from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his books translate French restaurant practice into instructions for American households. "Venitienne" here points to the French sauce vénitienne family, in which the flavour comes from green herbs — chervil, chives, parsley, tarragon — worked into butter or a reduction; the origin of the name itself is not documented. The fish is the local note. Weakfish, Cynoscion regalis, was one of the cheap and plentiful catches of the mid-Atlantic coast in Filippini's day, landed in quantity and sold in New York markets; its unappealing name comes from the fragile membrane in the mouth, which tears easily against a hook, not from the quality of the flesh. Dressing a common local fish in a Parisian herb butter is exactly the manoeuvre this book was written to teach.