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Kingfish Saute, Colbert
Have three medium-sized kingfish of three-quarters of a pound each, nicely cleaned. Wipe them neatly. Turn them in a little cold milk, season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, then roll them in flour. Heat two tablespoons oil in a frying pan, add the fish and fry for five minutes on each side, then place in the hot oven for ten minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve with a Colbert sauce poured over.
A straightforward pan-to-oven treatment of small whole fish, from a period when the sauce was the point and the fish was simply a vehicle for it. Two things need attention: what kingfish means, and the fact that the total cooking time is long for fish this size.
- What kingfish means hereIn an American book of this vintage this is most likely the northern kingfish (Menticirrhus saxatilis), a small Atlantic drum, not the king mackerel or the Pacific kingfish sold under that name today. Any firm-fleshed whole fish of about 12 oz works: small sea bass, croaker, red mullet, branzino or trout. The three-quarters of a pound is presumably the weight of the fish after cleaning.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; for a modern oven, read "hot" as roughly 425-450F. Preheat it before the fish goes in the pan, since the transfer is meant to be immediate.
- The timing runs longFive minutes a side plus ten in the oven is twenty minutes for a fish under a pound, which will leave it dry. Ten to twelve minutes total is closer to right; pull the fish at 130-135F at the thickest part of the shoulder, or when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- Milk then flourThe dip in cold milk is what makes the flour adhere and gives the crust its colour. Season the fish itself, not the milk, and flour it at the last moment: a dredged fish left standing goes pasty.
- Two tablespoons of oil is thinFor three whole fish you want enough fat to film the pan generously, closer to a quarter inch. Use an ovenproof pan so the whole thing goes into the oven without moving the fish, which is the point at which whole fish tend to break.
- Colbert sauceThis most likely means beurre Colbert: softened butter worked with meat glaze (reduced veal or beef stock), lemon juice, chopped tarragon, salt and cayenne, spooned over the hot fish so it melts. Period versions under the name vary, but it is generally handled as a compound butter rather than a simmered sauce, and should not be boiled or it will separate.
- YieldThree fish, three servings. Serve at once, on a warmed dish, or the butter pools and dulls.
The name honours Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, whose name came to be attached — by tradition at least — to a cluster of preparations built on meat glaze and herb butter, most famously sole Colbert — the fish boned through the back, egged and crumbed, fried, and filled with the butter. Filippini's version is the plain-cook's cousin of that dish: no boning, no crumb, just flour and a hot pan, with the sauce doing the work of making it French. He was for decades a manager and chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the kingfish here is a New York market fish, said to have been readily available in his day. That pairing — a local, unglamorous fish under a Parisian sauce name — is the whole point of the recipe.