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Coquilles of Bluefish, Italienne
Remove bones and skin of a two-and-a-half-pound fresh bluefish. Cut the meat in half-inch square pieces, place in a saucepan with gill white wine, pint water, a tablespoon vinegar and half teaspoon salt. Cover pan and boil ten minutes. Remove, drain and save the broth.
Heat tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, add six finely chopped shallots and lightly brown four minutes; add tablespoon flour and stir on fire until a light brown colour. Pour in half the quantity of the bluefish liquor and three gills demi-glace. Mix until it comes to a boiling point, then add twelve finely minced canned mushrooms and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Mix well and boil fifteen minutes. Then add the fish and carefully mix. Divide it evenly in six table shells; place on a tin. Sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits butter on top, set in oven fifteen minutes, remove and serve.
A gratin of poached fish in a brown mushroom sauce, baked in shells. The original assumes a professional kitchen with demi-glace already on the stove, and it assumes fish will be cooked twice.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so the wine is 1/2 cup and the three gills of demi-glace are 1 1/2 cups. The pint of water is a US pint, 2 cups.
- "Table shells"Scallop shells or small individual gratin dishes, roughly 4 to 5 inches across. Six of them means this serves six as a first course, or three as a main.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual in recipes of this period. 400F for 12 to 15 minutes will glaze the top; a minute under the broiler at the end does the same job faster.
- The double cookingTen minutes at a boil plus fifteen in the oven will leave bluefish dry and fibrous. Bring the wine and water to a bare simmer, slip in the fish, and take it off the heat after 3 to 4 minutes, when it is just opaque. It finishes in the sauce and the oven.
- Demi-glaceClassically a brown (espagnole) sauce and brown stock reduced together to a rich, glossy base, and the backbone of the dish. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a thin canned beef broth does not, and will leave the sauce watery no matter how long you boil it.
- Canned mushrooms"Twelve" means twelve whole button mushrooms, about 4 oz. Fresh mushrooms, minced and sautéed dry until they stop weeping, give a cleaner result; canned ones bring a metallic brine note the sauce has to cover.
- ShallotsSix is a lot by modern reckoning; two to three modern shallots, finely chopped, is about the right volume. Brown them gently -- burnt shallot in a brown roux is not recoverable.
- The fishBluefish is oily and assertive and does not keep; buy it the day you cook it or the sauce will taste of old fish. Spanish mackerel, mullet or Atlantic mackerel behave similarly.
Coquille is simply French for shell, and by 1900 it named a whole class of restaurant dishes: cooked fish or shellfish bound in sauce, heaped into shells, dusted with cheese and crumbs, and browned. It was a useful format for a hotel kitchen, since it made a presentable individual portion out of trimmings and leftover cooked fish. The label italienne in classical French cookery indicates a sauce built on minced mushrooms with shallot and chopped herbs -- a duxelles worked into a brown base -- and is conventionally said to have nothing to do with Italy, though the Parmesan on top nods in that direction. Bluefish, meanwhile, is a distinctly American choice: abundant and cheap along the Atlantic coast, strongly flavoured, and rarely seen in European cookbooks.