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Kingfish with White Wine
Scale, trim fins and cut off heads from two very fresh kingfish of one and a half pounds each. Split open without separating through front, remove spinal bones, place in a sautoire with half ounce butter, one gill white wine, a gill water, three finely sliced shallots, a branch parsley; squeeze in juice of quarter of a sound lemon. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoon pepper. Cover fish with buttered paper and slowly boil on range twenty minutes. Lift up with a skimmer and place on a hot dish; remove all water from around fish on dish. Knead on a plate one ounce butter with an ounce flour and add it little by little, to the fish liquor and briskly mix with a whisk while adding, then boil ten minutes. Dilute one egg yolk with a tablespoon cream, add to the sauce and sharply mix while heating one minute. Strain the sauce through a Chinese strainer over the fish. Arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around fish and serve.
A classic vin blanc treatment: the fish poaches in wine, and its liquor becomes the sauce. Two things need adjusting for a modern stove — the cooking time and the handling of the egg yolk.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolk goes inOnce the egg yolk and cream are stirred into the sauce, keep it below a simmer. A minute of gentle heat off the boil sets the liaison; a true boil curdles it into scrambled threads that no straining will rescue.
- Twenty minutes is far too longA split kingfish of a pound and a half will be done in 8 to 10 minutes of gentle poaching, less if the fillets are thin. Test at the backbone line: the flesh should just part and turn opaque.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so half a cup wine and half a cup water. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper — cut that to a quarter teaspoon unless you want it assertively peppery. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; an ounce is two.
- Sautoire and Chinese strainerA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow sauté pan, wide enough to hold both fish flat. A Chinese strainer is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer; any fine sieve works.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche — a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It traps steam and keeps the exposed surface from drying. Foil is a poor substitute because it does not sit on the fish the same way.
- Beurre maniéKneading equal weights of butter and flour cold and whisking it in bit by bit is the correct technique; do not skip the cold kneading or you get lumps. Ten minutes of boiling afterward is right — it cooks out the raw flour taste and reduces the liquor.
- The fish"Kingfish" in American markets of this period usually meant the northern kingfish or whiting, a small Atlantic drum, though in the South it also means king mackerel. Either works, as does any firm white fish of that size — striped bass, black sea bass, small snapper.
- Croutons and yieldThe heart-shaped croutons are white bread trimmed and fried in butter, set around the platter as much for looks as for eating. Two fish of this size serve four.
This is Delmonico's cooking written down for the home: Alexander Filippini spent decades in that restaurant's kitchens, and The International Cook Book reads throughout as a French professional's repertoire translated into American ingredients and market names. The method here is the standard sauce vin blanc of the French kitchen — poach in wine and aromatics, thicken the poaching liquor, finish with a yolk-and-cream liaison — applied to a cheap East Coast panfish rather than the sole or turbot it was built for. That substitution is the interesting part. Kingfish and whiting were abundant and inexpensive in New York markets around 1900, and dressing them in a restaurant sauce was precisely the promise such books made to their readers. The heart-shaped croutons, the paper cover, the conical strainer: these are hotel-kitchen habits set down without apology, on the assumption that a serious household cook would simply adopt them.