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Margot of Sheepshead
Remove skin and bones from sheepshead left over from yesterday, pick meat into small pieces and keep on a plate till required. Boil four peeled potatoes in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt for thirty-five minutes, drain on a sieve and press through potato masher into a sautoire. Add fish with an ounce butter, two eggs, a gill cream, teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and nutmeg, teaspoon freshly chopped parsley sharply stir on fire with wooden spoon for five minutes, remove and dress preparation in a fireproof dish. Smooth the surface to dome shape, spread yolk of an egg with knife blade over surface, set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and serve.
A leftover-fish gratin in the Delmonico idiom: cooked fish folded into stiff potato purée, domed, glazed with yolk and browned. The instructions assume a professional batterie de cuisine, so a few terms need translating.
- The hinge: dry the potatoThe purée has to be dry and stiff enough to hold a dome once the eggs and cream go in. Drain the boiled potatoes thoroughly, and let them steam off in the hot pan for a minute before mashing; wet potato slumps in the oven and weeps.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are seasoning accents rather than a dominant flavour.
- Sautoire and fireproof dishA sautoire is a shallow straight-sided sauté pan — any wide heavy skillet or saucepan works. "Fireproof dish" means an ovenproof gratin or baking dish, and the food is meant to be served in it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as with most entries of this vintage. The purpose is to set the egg and colour the yolk glaze, which suggests a fairly hot oven — around 400F — for the stated fifteen minutes; a brief pass under the broiler at the end will finish the browning if the top has not coloured.
- Potato timingThirty-five minutes suits whole large potatoes in a rolling boil. Quartered, mealy potatoes are done in 18-20 minutes; overboiled potatoes absorb water and work against the point above.
- The five minutes on the fireStirring the eggs and cream into hot potato over heat cooks the eggs into the purée rather than making a custard — keep the spoon moving and the heat moderate so the eggs thicken without scrambling into visible threads.
- SheepsheadThe Atlantic sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus) is still fished in the Gulf and South Atlantic but is uncommon at northern counters. Any firm cooked white fish — cod, haddock, drum, striped bass — behaves the same way here. Pick carefully for pin bones, since the mixture disguises them.
- YieldFour potatoes and the fish off one small cooked fish make a supper dish for three or four with a salad.
This is from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a former Delmonico's chef and organised as a vast alphabetical dictionary of dishes, many of them frankly designed to use up yesterday's dinner. Dish names like "Margot" are the standard French restaurant practice of hanging a woman's name on a garnish or preparation — Filippini's book is full of them, and in most cases no specific person can be documented behind the label. What is documented is the fish: sheepshead was a staple of the nineteenth-century New York market, common enough that Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn took its name from it, and it appears repeatedly in American cookbooks of the period before local stocks and fashion both declined. The recipe's real subject is thrift in a professional kitchen — cold fish, boiled potato, an egg yolk brushed over the top to make a leftover look like a dish that was planned.