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Kingfish, Trouville
Clean, wash and dry well two medium-sized fresh kingfish of one and a half pounds each. Place them in a frying pan with half pint hot water, half gill white wine, half ounce butter, one tablespoon vinegar, a teaspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper. Set in the oven and bake for twenty-five minutes. Remove, lift the fish with a skimmer, lay on a hot dish and keep warm. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a small saucepan, add two tablespoons flour, briskly stir, then strain the fish gravy into this roux and briskly whisk while heating for two minutes; let boil for ten minutes. Dilute one egg yolk with the juice half sound lemon and add to the sauce; stir well again. Plunge eighteen freshly opened Little Neck clams into boiling water for two minutes, take up, drain and add to the sauce; lightly mix. Then pour the sauce over the fish and serve very hot.
A whole baked fish with a velouté made from its own liquor, finished with egg yolk and lemon and garnished with clams. The measurements are Edwardian and the oven temperature is not given at all.
- The hinge: the yolk goes in off the heatThe sauce is boiled for ten minutes to cook out the flour, then the yolk slaked with lemon juice is stirred in. Pull the pan off the burner first and do not let it return to a boil, or the yolk scrambles and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A whole 1½ lb fish in a shallow pan of liquid wants about 400F and will be done in the stated 25 minutes when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 2 fl oz (¼ cup). Half a pint of hot water is one cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is ¼ teaspoon. A full quarter-teaspoon of cayenne in this quantity of liquid is assertive but not unreasonable; scale it back if the sauce is for a mild palate.
- Which kingfishIn American books of this period "kingfish" usually means the northern kingfish or whiting of the Atlantic coast, not the large king mackerel. Any firm-fleshed white fish of about 1½ lb whole works: whiting, small striped bass, black sea bass, branzino.
- The clamsEighteen shucked Little Necks blanched two minutes is right; longer and they tighten into rubber. Save the liquor from opening them and strain it into the sauce rather than discarding it.
- Roux proportionsOne tablespoon butter to two tablespoons flour is a lean, floury roux by modern habit. Equal volumes give a smoother sauce. The pan liquid as written comes to about 1¼ cups before baking, and with the clam liquor added it should reduce to enough sauce for a light coating consistency.
- YieldTwo fish of 1½ lb each serve four as a main course. The sauce is poured over the fish before serving; have the platter genuinely hot, since an egg-thickened sauce sets and dulls quickly on a cold dish.
Dishes labelled "Trouville" point to Trouville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, a working fishing port that became a fashionable sea-bathing resort in the mid-nineteenth century, and the name on a menu was often taken to suggest a Norman treatment of fish: baked or poached in wine, the cooking liquor bound with roux and enriched with egg yolk, then garnished with shellfish. That is broadly in the direction of sauce normande, and the use here of American Little Neck clams is plausibly the kind of translation this book exists to make. Alexander Filippini, who had cooked at Delmonico's in New York, built his international collections by fitting the French repertoire of the grand hotel kitchens onto whatever the American market supplied, which is why an Atlantic kingfish ends up wearing a Norman sauce.