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Flounders, American
Lift the filets from a fresh flounder of three and a half pounds, and carefully skin and cut each filet in three slanting equal pieces. Place in a frying pan a sliced onion, a saltspoon thyme and two bay leaves; arrange filets on top, season with a half teaspoon salt and two salt-spoons pepper; add half an ounce butter, juice of half a lemon, moisten with one and a half gills water, cover the fish with lightly buttered paper and set in oven twenty minutes. Remove, lift up filets with skimmer, dress on a hot dish and keep warm.
Heat a tablespoon of melted butter in a frying pan, add six finely chopped shallots and brown for five minutes, then add a tablespoon flour; stir while heating for five minutes, then add three good-sized finely chopped, peeled red tomatoes. Strain the fish liquor through a cheese-cloth over the tomatoes, mix well and briskly boil for ten minutes, pour sauce over fish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward braise-and-sauce method from the era when a whole fish was bought and broken down at home. Two things need attention: the oven time, which is long for thin fillets, and the archaic liquid measures.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is about 3/4 cup of water. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; two saltspoons of pepper is a half teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this; the liquid should barely tremble rather than boil around the fish.
- The twenty minutesSkinned flounder fillets cut in three are thin, and twenty minutes will leave them dry and shredding. Check at 8 minutes and pull them when the flesh just turns opaque and parts under light pressure.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the size of the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without sealing the pan the way foil does.
- Pan choiceA "frying pan" set in the oven means an ovenproof skillet or a shallow flameproof gratin dish. Both the fish and the sauce are done in one, so a heavy pan that moves from oven to burner saves washing up.
- The roux and the tomatoesFive minutes of stirring the flour in butter takes it to a blond roux, which is what you want here. The strained fish liquor goes in over the tomatoes, so the sauce is thickened by both flour and reduction; ten minutes of brisk boiling is meant to concentrate it, not to cook the tomato to a pulp.
- Strain, don't skipThe liquor carries the onion, thyme and bay flavour, but also the aromatics themselves and any stray bones. Cheesecloth is ideal; a fine sieve does the job.
- ShallotsSix suggests shallots smaller than the large banana type now common; two or three of the large modern kind, finely chopped, gives a comparable volume. Brown them gently -- scorched shallot turns the sauce bitter.
- YieldA 3.5 lb flounder yields roughly 1 1/4 lb of fillet, which serves three, four at a stretch as part of a longer menu.
The heading "Flounders, American" distinguishes the fish, not the method: the treatment is classic French, a shallow braise of fillets on a bed of aromatics with the cooking liquor turned into the sauce. Filippini's International Cook Book ranges widely over national labels, and its American entries often turn out to be French technique applied to a fish, bird or vegetable that Americans actually bought -- which is a fair description of how restaurant cooking in New York worked in his day, Filippini having come up at Delmonico's. Flounder was cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast, and the recipe assumes a cook who thinks nothing of filleting and skinning a whole fish. The tomato-and-shallot sauce, thickened with a blond roux and sharpened with lemon, sits near the tomato-based sauces of the French repertoire of the period.