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Kingfish Au Gratin
Scale, trim, wash and wipe two fresh one-and-a-half-pound kingfish. Cut off heads, split in two through back, remove spinal bone and place them in a baking dish, add half an ounce butter, half gill white wine, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and the juice of a quarter lemon. Cover fish with a buttered paper, set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove, pour gravy into a saucepan and let reduce on range to a glaze. Prepare an Italian sauce add to gravy pan, mix well, pour sauce and sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over fish, and set in oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, cut a small lemon in halves, then finely slice it, pick out seeds, arrange slices one beside another around the dish and serve.
A Delmonico's-style baked fish finished under an Italian sauce and Parmesan. The recipe assumes you already have sauce italienne on hand, which is the real work here.
- The hinge: Italian sauceSauce italienne is a duxelles sauce — finely chopped mushrooms and shallots sweated in butter, deglazed with white wine, bound with demi-glace, finished with chopped parsley and often a little tomato. Without it the dish is just baked fish; make or source a well-reduced brown sauce before you start, since the recipe gives you no time to build one.
- What kingfish means hereIn a New York book of this period, kingfish is the northern kingfish (Menticirrhus saxatilis), a small firm-fleshed drum, not king mackerel. Any lean white fish of about a pound and a half whole — sea bass, small snapper, croaker — behaves the same way. If you substitute king mackerel, note it is an oily fish and carries high mercury levels.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of white wine.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for a sauced fish.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; ranges of this period were rarely fitted with reliable oven thermometers. Bake at 375-400F for both stages; the first fifteen minutes should just set the flesh, the second is only to heat the sauce through and colour the cheese.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche — parchment cut to the dish, buttered side down, resting directly on the fish. It keeps the surface from drying while allowing the liquid to concentrate. Foil is a poorer substitute because it traps steam.
- Reducing to a glazeA quarter cup of wine plus the fish juices reduces to a spoonful or two of syrupy glaze in a few minutes over high heat. Watch it — at this volume it goes from glaze to burnt in seconds.
- Timing and donenessThirty minutes total is generous for split fish of this size by modern reckoning. Check after the first bake; the flesh should be barely opaque at the bone, since it returns to the oven.
- YieldTwo fish of a pound and a half whole, split, serve four as a main course.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style plainly: a modest local fish dressed in a classical French sauce and sent out with lemon slices ranged around the rim. Northern kingfish was cheap and abundant along the mid-Atlantic coast in the nineteenth century and appeared constantly on American hotel menus, though it has largely dropped out of commercial sight since. "Au gratin" here means what it meant in Escoffier's kitchen — a dish sauced, dusted with cheese or crumbs and browned — rather than the cream-and-potato sense the phrase later acquired in English. The instruction to prepare an Italian sauce with no further explanation tells you who the book was written for: a cook with a stockpot already going and a repertoire of mother sauces in hand.