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Broiled Weakfish, Maitre D'Hotel
Cut the head off, trim and split in two through the back, a very fresh weakfish of three pounds. Remove the spinal bone, season with a teaspoon of salt and half teaspoon paprika. Rub it all around with a teaspoon oil, place it on the broiler, cut side downward, and broil for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, spread a maitre d'hotel butter, over and serve.
A plain broiled fish that depends almost entirely on freshness and on the compound butter it is finished with. Two things need translating: what "the broiler" meant in 1910, and the fact that the maitre d'hotel butter is assumed knowledge here.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe book expects you to know it: softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, roughly a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of juice to every four tablespoons butter. Roll it in paper, chill firm, and lay coins of it on the hot fish so it melts at the table.
- "The broiler"In this period broiling could mean a hinged wire grid held over coals, with the heat coming from below, though gas ranges with overhead broiling ovens were also in use; the direction "cut side downward" first suggests heat from beneath. Under a modern overhead broiler, start the fish skin side down on an oiled rack about four inches from the element and turn once, or skip the turn entirely and give it eight to ten minutes without flipping.
- WeakfishCynoscion regalis, also sold as squeteague or grey sea trout on the Atlantic coast. It is soft-fleshed and bruises easily, which is why the recipe insists on "very fresh." Spotted seatrout, striped bass, black bass or any similar 2–3 lb round fish takes the same treatment.
- Splitting through the backButterflying from the spine side rather than the belly leaves the two fillets joined at the belly skin and lying flat. A fishmonger will do this; ask for it kited or butterflied, backbone out, skin on.
- Timing and donenessSix minutes a side suits a 3 lb butterflied fish, but judge by the flesh rather than the clock -- it should be opaque and just separating at the thickest point. Cooks after a moist result often pull fish at around 130-135F, though the standard food-safety figure for fish is 145F. Fish this thin overcooks in under a minute of inattention.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt on a 3 lb fish is about right for a whole butterflied side, but season the cut face and leave the skin lightly salted; the skin takes very little.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; a 3 lb whole fish, headed and boned, would feed about three as a main course, or four as part of a longer meal.
Weakfish were one of the great cheap fish of the eastern seaboard in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, netted in quantity from Chesapeake Bay to Long Island Sound and sold in New York markets under the name squeteague, generally traced to a Narragansett word. The name "weakfish" is usually explained as referring not to flavour but to the tender mouth, which tears easily against a hook, though it has also been derived from the Dutch weekvisch, soft fish, for the flesh itself. Maitre d'hotel butter -- from the title of the head of the household staff -- is the plainest of the classical compound butters, and had become a routine finish for grilled meat and fish in hotel dining rooms: steak, chops, and above all fish, where the parsley and lemon supply everything a bare piece of broiled flesh lacks. Filippini's book belongs to that Delmonico-trained tradition, where a recipe like this one is less a set of instructions than a reminder of a sequence any professional cook already had in his hands.