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Broiled Pompano, Tartare Sauce
Prepare and finish the pompano and serve with a tartare sauce in a bowl separately in place of the maitre d'hotel.
This is a one-line variation on the broiled pompano that precedes it in the book, so the whole method is assumed rather than stated. Everything that matters is in what it leaves out.
- What is actually being askedBroil the fish exactly as for the plain preparation that precedes it, then swap the compound butter for a bowl of cold tartare sauce passed at the table. The sauce is not cooked with the fish and never goes under the broiler. The details of the broiling itself are in the earlier recipe, not here.
- Maitre d'hotel, for referenceThe butter this replaces is softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced onto the hot fish. If you have no tartare sauce made, that is the fallback the book itself assumes.
- Tartare sauce of the periodGenerally a thick mayonnaise, made by hand with yolks and oil, sharpened with vinegar or lemon and stirred through with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot or onion and parsley. Recipes of the era vary, but such a sauce tends to be stiffer and sharper than bottled versions; jarred mayonnaise thinned slightly with lemon gets close.
- Heat and timePompano is a firm, oily fish but thin. Under a preheated broiler set high, allow roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side for a split fish of about a pound, and stop as soon as the flesh at the backbone loses its translucence. Overcooked pompano dries out fast despite the fat.
- Buying the fishFlorida pompano is still sold, mostly whole and mostly in the Gulf states, and is not cheap. Whole butterflied fish of 1 to 1 1/2 lb serve one to two people. Bluefish, mackerel, black bass or a small permit broil the same way if pompano is unavailable.
- Serving cold sauce with hot fishKeep the sauce genuinely cold and the plates hot; a room-temperature mayonnaise on a hot fillet begins to break and turns greasy. Bring it to the table in its own bowl, as the recipe specifies, rather than spooning it over.
- Raw egg in the sauceA hand-made mayonnaise is uncooked egg yolk. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated.
Pompano was the prestige fish of the Gulf Coast in the early twentieth century — expensive, shipped on ice to northern hotels, and closely associated with New Orleans, where it was baked in paper as pompano en papillote. Its appearance in an international collection reflects the way American grand-hotel cooking of the period was itself organised on French lines: the fish is local, but the two finishes offered, maitre d'hotel butter and sauce tartare, are both straight out of the classical French repertoire, and the recipe assumes a reader who knows both by name. The terse cross-reference style is typical of professional cookery writing of the era, where a single base preparation was published once and then varied by a sentence at a time, much as Escoffier's Guide Culinaire had done.