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Black Bass, Montebello
Scale, trim and wipe a fresh black bass of three pounds; place in a frying pan with half an ounce butter, half gill white wine, one and a half gills water, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes on the range, then set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish, pour a Montebello sauce over the fish and serve.
A plain oven-braise: the fish cooks in a shallow pan under buttered paper in its own steam and a little wine. Two things need translating — the liquid measures and the cooking time.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup; a gill and a half of water is 3/4 cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- The pan"Frying pan" here means a shallow ovenproof saute pan or fish pan wide enough to hold a whole 3 lb fish flat. A roasting pan or large oval gratin dish does the same job.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside. It holds steam against the fish and keeps the exposed skin from drying, which foil does less gracefully because it traps too much.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not even say 'moderate.' A moderate oven of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 350-375F, and something in that range suits a covered braise of this kind.
- TimeThirty minutes after a five-minute boil risks overcooking a 3 lb fish. Whole fish is commonly taken from the oven at 130-140F at the thickest point behind the head (USDA advises 145F), or when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone — roughly 20-25 minutes at this heat for a fish of this size. Start checking at about 18.
- Black bassLargemouth and smallmouth bass are classed as game fish and their sale is prohibited in most US states, so wild ones are rarely on the market; a little farmed largemouth is sold. Unless someone brings you one, use a whole striped bass, branzino, snapper or black sea bass of similar weight.
- Montebello sauceA named sauce given separately rather than improvised at the stove; presumably it appears elsewhere in the book. Make it before the fish goes in the oven. The strained pan liquor — that quarter cup of wine and the fish juices — is worth using in it rather than discarding, though the recipe does not say so.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves three, four if the rest of the menu is generous. Bring it to the table whole and lift the fillets off the bone there.
The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's kitchen tradition, and this is a restaurant recipe in miniature: a whole fish braised in a covered pan, dressed on a hot dish, finished with a named sauce made separately. Black bass was one of the great American restaurant fish of the late nineteenth century, hauled from northern lakes and rivers and shipped on ice to city markets. States reclassified bass as game fish and closed off their sale piecemeal over several decades, which is why the dish now reads as a period piece. Sauce and garnish names ending in Montebello belong to the French practice of commemorating battles and marshals on the menu, and are generally traced to the 1800 engagement at Montebello and the title it gave Marshal Lannes; the naming says more about the dining room's aspirations than about the sauce.