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Black Bass, Mousseline
Clean, trim and neatly wipe two fresh black bass of one and a half pounds each. Place them in a sautoire with half ounce butter, half gill white wine, three gills cold water, one teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the fish with a sheet of lightly buttered paper, place the pan on the fire and boil for five minutes, then place in a brisk oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, take up the fish with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish, decorate with parsley greens and six sections of lemon. Prepare a sauce mousseline, adding to it one tablespoon fish gravy; thoroughly mix and serve in a saucebowl separately.
A straightforward braise-then-roast for whole fish, written for a cook who already knows the sauce. The two things to settle before you start are the pan liquid and where you will get the fish.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and three gills of water is 1 1/2 cups. That liquid should come partway up the fish, not cover them.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan or shallow braiser, wide enough to hold both fish flat without overlapping and able to go from burner to oven. A roasting pan works if you can bring it to a boil on the stove.
- Brisk ovenRoughly 400-450F; the term is not precise in period usage. The five-minute boil sets the flesh and gets the liquid hot; the oven finishes it.
- The buttered paperA cartouche cut to the pan's width, buttered side down, keeps the exposed backs of the fish from drying while they steam-bake. Parchment does the job; foil traps too much and is harder to lift off cleanly.
- TimingFifteen minutes suits two whole fish of 1 1/2 lb each. Check at twelve: the flesh should part from the backbone at the thickest point and read about 130-135F. Whole fish carry heat well and will overshoot on the platter.
- Sourcing the fishBlack bass here most likely means the freshwater Micropterus, largemouth or smallmouth, still a market fish in the late nineteenth century but a game fish now and not sold commercially in most of the United States; period usage sometimes applied the name to the Atlantic black sea bass as well. Two whole striped bass, branzino or black sea bass of the same size behave much the same in this method.
- Sauce mousselineFilippini assumes you know it: hollandaise finished with stiffly whipped cream folded in at the end, roughly a quarter cup of cream to a cup of sauce. Fold the cream in off the heat and serve within the half hour, since a mousseline breaks and deflates if held warm too long.
- The fish gravyThe tablespoon of pan liquid stirred into the sauce is the point of the whole dish. Strain it, and if it tastes thin, reduce the pan liquid hard for a minute or two first.
- YieldTwo 1 1/2 lb whole fish serve four to six.
This comes from Alexander Filippini, of Delmonico's in New York, where he worked for many years in the kitchens and as a manager, and whose cookbooks carried the French repertoire of the great American hotel kitchens into domestic use. Sauce mousseline, hollandaise lightened with whipped cream and sometimes called sauce chantilly, belongs to that repertoire: rich but airy, a standard partner for poached fish and asparagus in the French service of the period. The fish, though, is thoroughly American. Black bass appeared regularly on nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant menus, shipped in from inland lakes and rivers, before conservation pressure and the rise of sport fishing pushed it out of the commercial market. A page like this catches the moment when a Parisian sauce and an American freshwater fish were expected to meet on the same platter.