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Kingfish, Mornay
Neatly trim and wipe two fresh kingfish of one and a half pounds each; place in a frying pan with half ounce butter, half gill white wine, two branches parsley, juice of a sound quarter lemon, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Cover fish with lightly buttered paper, boil five minutes on range, then set to bake in oven for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up with a skimmer, lay in baking dish. Pour a sauce Mornay and sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over the fish, and set in oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, cut a sound lemon in half, then slice it finely, arrange slices around fish and serve.
A Delmonico-style fish gratin that assumes you already have a saucepan of Mornay standing by. The original is vague on oven heat and generous with the cooking time; both need adjusting.
- What kingfish means hereIn an American book of this period, kingfish usually means the northern kingfish, a small Atlantic drum also sold as whiting, not the large king mackerel of Gulf markets. Any firm, lean white fish of about a pound and a half whole works: whiting, small striped bass, black sea bass, branzino.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. That is all the liquid the fish gets, which is the point: this is a shallow braise, not a poach.
- Three saltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper for two small fish. That is aggressive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks will want.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, for the first stage, and 425F or a broiler for the gratin at the end.
- The timingsFive minutes on the range plus twenty in the oven will overcook a 1 1/2 lb whole fish, which is done at 140F at the thickest point in roughly fifteen to eighteen minutes total. Cook it just short, then give it five to eight minutes under the Mornay rather than the fifteen specified, long enough to glaze and brown the top.
- Buttered paperA parchment cartouche cut to the size of the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the flesh from drying while the small amount of wine steams. Foil works but seals more tightly and will steam harder.
- Sauce MornayA bechamel finished off the heat with grated Gruyere and Parmesan, and in the classic version an egg yolk. Two cups is about right for two fish. Add the cheese off the heat so it melts rather than seizing into strings.
- Pan and yieldThe frying pan must be ovenproof, since the fish goes from range to oven in it. Two fish of this size serve four as a main course.
The International Cook Book belongs to Alexander Filippini, long a cook, steward, and manager at Delmonico's in New York, and this dish shows the house style exactly: an ordinary market fish treated to a French finish. Kingfish, the small Atlantic drum, was cheap and abundant on New York fish stalls through the nineteenth century and turns up on hotel menus, where a coating of Mornay and a run through the oven turned it into something worth charging for. The sauce is named for Philippe de Mornay, the sixteenth-century Huguenot statesman, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the sauce itself is generally traced to nineteenth-century Paris, a bechamel enriched with grated cheese. Serving the fish glazed and browned under cheese with lemon slices around the dish follows the usual gratin presentation, meant to be carried to the table in the dish it baked in.