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Bass, Bordelaise
Scale and trim off fins from a three pound sea bass, place it in a baking dish, pour in one and a half gills claret, one light teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Sprinkle over teaspoon finely chopped shallot. Cover the fish with sheet of buttered paper and set to bake in the oven thirty minutes. Remove, dress the fish on a hot dish. Transfer the gravy to a saucepan, add the juice of quarter of a sound lemon, one gill demi-glace, six sliced canned mushrooms, and half bean of finely chopped garlic, lightly mix, boil ten minutes. Pour the sauce over the bass and serve.
A whole fish baked in red wine, with the wine liquor finished into a sauce. The measures are old bar-and-pantry units, and the oven temperature is simply not stated.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of claret is 3/4 cup and one gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper about 3/4 teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo oven heat is given in the recipe, only the thirty minutes. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, will bake a 3 lb whole bass in about that time; standard guidance is to cook fish to 145F at the thickest point beside the backbone, when the flesh parts cleanly from the bone.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche, cut to sit directly on the fish. It keeps the skin from drying while letting the wine reduce a little. Parchment does the job; foil traps too much steam.
- ClaretNineteenth-century claret means dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works, but avoid anything oaky or jammy, which turns metallic when reduced with fish.
- Demi-glaceA brown sauce reduced with brown stock (classically espagnole plus stock, cooked down), and the hinge of the dish: without it the sauce is thin wine. A good commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute, or reduce 1 1/2 cups strong brown stock to 1/2 cup.
- "Half bean of garlic"'Bean' here appears to mean a clove, so half a clove, finely chopped. Either way the quantity is very small beside the teaspoon of shallot.
- Canned mushroomsThey appear routinely in professional recipe books of this period, and are the weakest element now. Six sliced fresh cremini, briefly sauteed in butter before going into the sauce, give what the canned ones were standing in for.
- Ten minutes' boilThe point is reduction, not cooking, so keep the sauce at a strong simmer until it coats a spoon, then taste before salting; demi-glace is already seasoned. Strain if you want it smooth.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves two to four depending on appetite. Dress it on a warmed platter, as directed, or the sauce will chill on contact.
"Bordelaise" points to Bordeaux, and in classical French cooking it marks a red-wine sauce built on shallots and a brown reduction; the beef version with poached marrow is the one most people know, though fish treated this way -- the wine baked around the fish and the liquor then finished with demi-glace -- also appears in restaurant recipe books. Sea bass here reflects an American kitchen applying the formula to a local fish. The recipe's shape suggests its origin: paper cover, gills and saltspoons, demi-glace assumed to hand, canned mushrooms. This is professional hotel and restaurant cooking of the turn of the twentieth century set down for readers at home, and the assumption that a cook keeps brown sauce ready is the clearest sign of how far the household of that era was expected to imitate the commercial one.