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Kingfish, Comtesse
Procure two small fresh kingfish of one pound each. Split in two through the back, remove all the bones and cut the fish in equal one-inch pieces. Place them in a saucepan with half gill sherry. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper. Mix a little, then cover the fish with a sheet of buttered paper. Set in the oven for ten minutes. Remove from the oven, lift up the paper, place the pan on the fire, add half gill cream, one gill hot milk and twelve sliced heads canned mushrooms. Boil the whole for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks in two tablespoons cold milk and add to the fish; gently stir while cooking for two minutes, but do not allow to boil. Equally divide the prepared fish into six paper cases, arrange on a dish and serve.
A Delmonico-style fish course in paper cases, thickened with an egg-yolk liaison. Nearly everything here is straightforward; the one step that will ruin it is the last one.
- Do not boil after the yolks go inOnce the diluted yolks are stirred in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will scramble into grains. Two minutes of gentle stirring over low heat is all it needs, and pulling the pan off the burner while it finishes is safer than trusting the flame.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup, half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup, and one gill of hot milk is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons of cayenne a full half teaspoon — aggressive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks will want.
- What kingfish means hereIn an American book of this period kingfish is the northern kingfish or whiting, a small Atlantic drum, not the king mackerel sold under that name in the South and not the Pacific yellowtail. Any firm, mild, non-oily white fish in one-pound whole size works: whiting, small hake, black sea bass or haddock fillet cut to one-inch pieces.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. A moderate oven, around 350F, for ten minutes will just set one-inch pieces of a small fish; the fish should be barely opaque, since it gets five more minutes of boiling in the sauce afterward.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche — a sheet of buttered parchment laid directly on the fish so it steams in the sherry rather than drying or browning. Cut it to the diameter of the pan; foil is a poor substitute because it traps too much and encourages the fish to stew.
- Canned mushroom heads"Heads" are caps, and canned mushrooms were a common hotel store-cupboard item in this period. Twelve caps is roughly a cup sliced. Fresh cremini or button mushrooms, sliced and sweated in butter first to drive off their water, give a cleaner result.
- Paper casesCaisses were small pleated paper or parchment shells, oiled or buttered and briefly dried in the oven so they held their shape. Small ramekins, scallop shells or ovenproof paper baking cups do the same job; the point is an individual serving that goes to the table looking composed.
- YieldSix cases from two pounds of whole fish makes this a first course or light lunch dish, not a main. Figure two to three ounces of boned fish per person.
This belongs to the American grand-hotel repertoire, when New York kitchens worked in French forms with local fish. Kingfish -- the northern kingfish, a small drum -- was abundant in Atlantic markets and cheap enough to be an everyday market fish, which is precisely why chefs liked dressing it up: sherry, cream, an egg liaison, canned mushrooms and individual paper cases turn a modest whiting into a course worth naming. The name itself follows the classical convention of attaching a title to a garnish rather than describing the dish; "Comtesse" in French kitchen usage is usually attached to delicate, creamy, pale preparations, though the garnishes given under the name vary, and no particular countess need be looked for behind it. The paper case, or caisse, was a fashionable service of the period for exactly this sort of small, saucy preparation.