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Blackfish, Brown Butter
Scale, trim off fins and thoroughly wipe two small blackfish of one and a half pounds each; make three slanting, light incisions on both sides of the skin. Season with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper. Baste with a little cold milk, then lightly turn in flour. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add fish, fry five minutes on each side, then set in oven ten minutes, remove, and dress fish on a dish. Add a half ounce butter to pan, toss on fire until a nice brown, then add half a teaspoon chopped parsley, squeeze in juice of a lemon, toss a little and serve.
A whole pan-fried fish finished in the oven, with the pan butter turned into the sauce. The hinge is the butter: it must go from foaming to hazelnut brown and be poured out at once, since it darkens to bitterness within seconds.
- BlackfishOn the Atlantic coast this is tautog, still sold whole in Northeast markets. Any firm-fleshed white fish of about 1.5 lb dressed will behave the same way: black sea bass, porgy, small snapper, branzino.
- Oven heatNone is given. Treat it as a hot oven, 400-425F, since the fish is already seared and only needs the last few minutes to cook through at the bone.
- The slashesThree shallow diagonal cuts per side are not decoration; they let heat into the thickest part so the shoulder finishes at the same time as the tail, and they keep the skin from curling in the pan.
- Butter for fryingA tablespoon will not fry two whole fish without burning. Use 3-4 tablespoons, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and wipe the pan clean before making the brown butter so the scorched flour does not go into the sauce.
- Half an ounceOne tablespoon. For two fish, 2-3 tablespoons of fresh butter makes a more useful amount of sauce.
- "Toss on fire"Means over direct heat, swirling the pan. Take the butter off as soon as the milk solids are the color of a hazelnut shell and it smells nutty, then add parsley and lemon off the heat so it stops cooking.
- LemonThe juice of a whole lemon is a lot against the half ounce of butter the recipe calls for. Add half, taste, and add the rest if it needs it.
- DonenessTotal cooking here is about 20 minutes for a 1.5 lb fish, which is right. The flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone; 130-135F at the thickest point.
- YieldTwo fish of this size serve two generously, or four as a first course.
Blackfish is tautog, Tautoga onitis, a blunt-headed wrasse of the rocky Atlantic bottom from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas; the name is generally traced to the Narragansett word tautauog, taken into English as a plural and then used as a singular. It was a staple of New York and New England fish markets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cheap, firm and sweet, which is why the book treats it as an everyday fish worth no special ceremony. The treatment itself is French rather than American: flour, hot butter, and beurre noisette sharpened with lemon and parsley, the same finish that dresses skate, trout and brains in the professional repertoire of the period. Dishes of this kind travel under the label meunière, from the miller's wife, in reference to the light dusting of flour.