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Filet of Sheepshead, Farley
Cut two filets of sheepshead in three slanting, even pieces each. Lightly heat an ounce butter in saute pan, lay in filets one beside another, season with a teaspoon salt, half light teaspoon white pepper and one-quarter saltspoon grated nutmeg. Pour over a gill white wine, cover filets with a buttered paper and set in moderate oven for twenty minutes. Cut away the bottoms of a pound medium-sized fresh mushrooms, lay umbrellas aside for further use, thoroughly clean and wipe dry bottoms and finely chop them up. Heat an ounce fresh butter in a small saucepan, add chopped mushrooms, season with a saltspoon salt and let gently cook for ten minutes, lightly stirring with a wooden spoon once in a while. Sprinkle over a half tablespoon of flour, stir again for a minute and transfer filets into a baking dish. Strain fish gravy over mushrooms, pour in a gill hot milk or cream, stir well, allow to boil for three minutes and pour same over filets. Sprinkle surface with a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese, set in a very hot oven until a nice golden colour, remove and immediately send to table with a few slices lemon.
A baked-fish gratin in the Delmonico's manner, straightforward apart from a few nineteenth-century measures and one timing that will overcook the fish.
- SheepsheadArchosargus probatocephalus, the porgy relative once landed in quantity off Brooklyn, is rarely sold outside the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts. Black sea bass, porgy, red snapper or black drum give the same firm white flake; allow about 1 1/2 lb of skinless fillet.
- Old measuresA gill is 1/2 cup, so 1/2 cup white wine and 1/2 cup hot milk or cream. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making the nutmeg a bare pinch. The salt in the fish seasoning is generous for this weight of fillet; scale it back if your Parmesan is sharp.
- Oven heat"moderate" is usually read as about 350-375F. The final browning in a "very hot" oven means somewhere around 450-500F, or simply run the dish under the broiler for two or three minutes, watching it.
- Cut the baking timeTwenty minutes at 350F will dry out slanting pieces of fillet. Ten to twelve minutes, until the fish is just opaque and reads 130-135F at the thickest point, is enough; it gets more heat under the cheese at the end.
- The buttered paperA round of parchment buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish traps steam and keeps the surface from drying. It is not a lid — it should sit on the fish, not seal the pan.
- Stems, not capsThe sauce is built on chopped mushroom stems only; the caps are set aside "for further use" in another dish, which would suit a kitchen using mushrooms in quantity. If you would rather not stockpile a pound of caps, chop whole mushrooms and use them all.
- The hingeStrain the wine-and-butter cooking liquor from the fish into the floured mushrooms before adding the milk, and let it boil the full three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste. That gravy is the only real seasoning in the sauce; discarding it leaves the dish flat.
- YieldSix pieces of fish — three or four servings as a main course, six as a first course. Serve straight from the baking dish while the gratin is still bubbling, with lemon.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries the marks of that kitchen: a garnish-and-sauce formula attached to a proper name, in the French restaurant convention where filet de sole Marguery or tournedos Rossini identified a treatment rather than a place. Who "Farley" was is not recorded in the book; such names generally commemorated a patron, a colleague or the occasion the dish was first sent out, and dozens of them circulated among American hotel kitchens with no explanation attached. The fish itself dates the page more firmly than the sauce does. Sheepshead was a New York market staple through the nineteenth century, common enough that Sheepshead Bay is traditionally said to have taken its name from the catch, and by the time this book appeared in 1906 the local fishery is generally reported to have thinned to the point that the name survives better on the map than on the fishmonger's slab.