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Broiled Porgies, Maitre D'Hotel
Scale, neatly trim and wipe dry six small, very fresh porgies. Mix in a plate a tablespoon oil with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; roll the porgies repeatedly in the seasoning. Arrange on a broiler and broil for five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish. Spread a maitre d'hotel butter over them evenly and serve.
A plain grilled fish that depends on two things the original leaves unsaid: what "broiler" meant in 1929, and what goes into maître d'hôtel butter.
- The broiler is a grillIn this period a "broiler" could mean either a hinged double wire grid clamped around the fish and held over live coals and turned as a unit, or the broiler compartment of a gas or coal range; the recipe does not say which. On a modern overhead broiler, set the rack 4 inches from the element and preheat it fully; a hot grill or a ridged pan gives a closer result than the oven does.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe book assumes you know it: soften 4 oz butter and work in about 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, the juice of half a lemon, a good pinch of salt and white pepper. Keep it cold and firm so it melts over the hot fish at table rather than in the kitchen.
- PorgiesPorgy on the American East Coast means scup and its relatives, sold whole at 3/4 to 1 lb and still common at fish counters. Sea bream, snapper or small black bass take the same treatment. "Small" here means a fish that fits a broiler whole, roughly 8 to 10 inches.
- TimingFive minutes a side suits a fish under a pound over real heat. Judge by the thickest part behind the head: the flesh should part cleanly from the backbone. Cooks who go by temperature often pull whole fish at 130-135F, though the USDA figure for fish is 145F. A pound-and-a-half fish will need seven or eight minutes a side, and scoring the flanks twice on each side helps it cook evenly.
- Oil and stickingOne tablespoon of oil for six fish is barely a film. Oil the grid as well, and leave the fish undisturbed for the first few minutes so the skin sets before you try to turn it.
- White pepperCalled for so no black specks show against pale fish and pale butter. It is a different, more fermented flavor than black pepper, not just a cosmetic swap.
- YieldSix small whole fish serve three to six people depending on size, with a plainly boiled potato and lemon. Porgies are bony along the flanks; serve them whole and let each person lift the fillets off the frame.
Maitre d'hotel butter is one of the small compound butters codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking and carried wholesale into English and American hotel kitchens, where it became the default finish for anything broiled: steak, chops, and above all fish. The name is often said to mean the headwaiter's butter, the sort of last-minute dressing added in the dining room rather than the kitchen, though a la maitre d'hotel more generally denotes a plain, quickly made steward's-style preparation. Pairing it with porgies suggests an American book: scup was a cheap, abundant Atlantic panfish, landed in quantity from New England to the Chesapeake, and dressing it with a classical French butter is exactly the move an early twentieth-century compiler made to bring a humble local fish into "the world's kitchen."