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Boiled Sheepshead, Shrimp Sauce
Scale, cut off fins, wash and neatly wipe a fresh sheepshead of five to six pounds. Place in a large saucepan, pour in water enough to cover fish, add a half gill vinegar, sliced carrot, sliced onion, two branches parsley, a sprig thyme, two bay leaves, two cloves, a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover pan, let simmer for an hour, lift up fish without breaking it, dress on hot dish with a folded napkin and serve with a shrimp sauce separately.
This is a classic court bouillon poach, written for a whole fish and a linen-draped platter. Two things need attention: the vinegar measure and the cooking time.
- Half a gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup. Any mild wine vinegar or cider vinegar works; the acid firms the flesh and keeps it white.
- An hour is far too longA 5-6 lb whole fish in barely trembling liquid is done in roughly 30-40 minutes, or when the flesh at the thickest part of the back reaches about 135-140F and pulls cleanly from the bone. An hour at a true simmer will shred it, which is awkward given the next instruction is to lift it out unbroken.
- Simmer means shiverBring the liquid up, then hold it just below bubbling. A rolling simmer tears the skin and clouds the broth. Starting the fish in cold liquid and bringing it up slowly gives the most even result.
- Getting it out wholeA fish poacher with a perforated rack is the right vessel. Failing that, wrap the fish loosely in cheesecloth with long ends left out as handles, or lay it on a doubled strip of foil.
- SheepsheadThe saltwater sheepshead, Archosargus probatocephalus, is still landed along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and still sold whole. It is not the same fish as the freshwater sheepshead of the Great Lakes. Black drum, porgy, striped bass or red snapper all poach the same way. The scales are notoriously hard and the dorsal spines sharp; many fishmongers will scale and trim it on request.
- The shrimp sauceNot given here; it would have been found among the book's sauces rather than with the fish. Such a sauce is typically a velouté or thin béchamel finished with butter, a little of the poaching liquid, and small peeled shrimp warmed through at the end. Add the shrimp off the boil so they stay tender.
- The folded napkinNot decoration for its own sake. A folded cloth on the hot platter absorbs the liquid that continues to drain from a poached fish, so the piece is not sitting in a puddle at the table.
- YieldA fish this size serves five or six as a main course. Strain and save the court bouillon; it makes a good base for a fish soup the next day.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe carries the marks of that world: a court bouillon of vinegar and aromatics, a whole fish presented on a napkin, the sauce sent to table separately in its own boat. Sheepshead was a genuinely prized market fish on the American East Coast in the nineteenth century, common enough and esteemed enough that a stretch of Brooklyn waterfront took its name from the species. The northern stocks thinned considerably by the early twentieth century, for reasons often attributed to heavy fishing though cold winters and habitat change have also been cited, which is part of why a fish that once read as everyday now looks regional and slightly exotic to a reader in New York. The pairing with shrimp sauce follows the standard French logic of the period, where a poached white fish was almost never sent out plain but arrived under or beside a butter-enriched sauce built on the same family of flavors.