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Codfish, Provencale
Procure three very fresh codfish steaks three-quarters of an inch thick. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Place in a frying pan with one tablespoon melted butter, half gill white wine, two gills hot broth or hot water, six finely chopped, sound shallots, one tablespoon chopped parsley and a bean sound, chopped garlic.
Cover the pan with a piece of buttered paper and let slowly boil for twenty minutes. Lift up the paper, place the fish on a hot dish and keep warm. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon smelted butter, add one tablespoon flour, briskly stir, then add the gravy of the fish, stir well for a minute; dilute one egg yolk in two tablespoons cold milk and add it to the sauce; briskly whisk up for one minute. Squeeze in the juice of half a sound lemon, mix a little, then pour the sauce over the fish and serve.
A straightforward braise of cod in wine and broth, finished with a flour-thickened sauce enriched with egg yolk. Two things in the original need attention: the cooking time and the moment the yolk goes in.
- Cook the fish far lessTwenty minutes at a slow boil will turn three-quarter-inch cod steaks dry and chalky. At a bare simmer they are done in 8 to 10 minutes, when the flesh just parts along its flakes at the bone.
- Never boil the sauce after the yolkOnce the yolk-and-milk liaison goes in, hold the sauce below a simmer, around 180F. Boiling scrambles the yolk and the sauce breaks into grains. Whisk off the heat if you are unsure.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup; two gills of broth is 1 cup.
- "A bean" of garlicAn old measure meaning a piece of garlic about the size of a bean, so a small clove or less rather than a large one. Against six shallots, garlic is a background note here, not the lead.
- "Smelted" butterReads as melted butter. For the roux, melt the tablespoon of butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute before adding the strained braising liquid, or the sauce tastes of raw flour.
- Buttered paperThe text says to cover the pan with it; in practice this is the cartouche, a round of paper cut roughly to the pan's diameter and buttered, which keeps the fish moist without sealing the pan the way a lid does.
- Strain the gravyThe recipe pours the braising liquid straight into the roux. Straining out the shallot and parsley first gives a smoother sauce; return a spoonful of the solids at the end if you want the texture.
- YieldThree steaks serve three, or two generously. The sauce quantity is right for that amount and does not scale well past double, since the yolk becomes harder to control.
The name here is doing less work than it looks. Classical a la provencale usually signals tomato, olive oil and garlic, but this preparation is a white wine braise finished with a butter-flour sauce and an egg yolk liaison, essentially a fish veloute; the Provencal claim rests entirely on the garlic and the shallots. That looseness is characteristic of grand-hotel cookery of the period, in which regional French tags were applied to dishes built on a common set of restaurant sauces. Fresh cod steaks, specified as "very fresh," also mark this as a dish for a well-supplied city kitchen rather than a domestic one. The buttered paper laid over the fish is standard professional practice, and it survives today as the cartouche.