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Panfish, Maitre D'Hotel
Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Roll six fresh, well-wiped panfish in the seasoning repeatedly, arrange on a broiler and broil on a brisk charcoal fire four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish. Spread a maitre d'hotel over them and serve.
A bare-bones grill recipe that assumes two things the modern reader may not have: a live charcoal fire and a jar of maître d'hôtel butter already made. Everything else is a matter of heat and dryness.
- What a panfish isNot a species but a size class: any small whole fish that fits a pan or a grill grid. The term is used most often of small freshwater fish -- perch, small trout, sunfish -- though small sea fish such as whiting, sardines, small mackerel and butterfish are handled the same way. Buy them scaled and gutted, heads on.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe book means the compound butter, not a sauce: softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled. A coin of it laid on the hot fish melts into the dressing. If your source recipe is elsewhere in the book, this is the one to look up.
- "Well-wiped" is the hingeFish that goes onto the fire wet steams and sticks. Pat each one thoroughly dry inside and out before it touches the oil and seasoning, and oil the grill bars as well.
- A brisk charcoal fireCoals burned down to grey ash with no flame, hot enough that you can hold a hand five inches above the grate for only two or three seconds. A gas grill on high or an oven broiler with the rack near the element gives comparable heat.
- The broiler here is a hinged gridThe broiler here is a grid, not an oven -- period broilers included plain gridirons and hinged double-wire grids that clamped the fish so it could be turned whole. Small whole fish break apart when turned with tongs, so a hinged fish grid is worth having.
- Four minutes a sideRight for a fish an inch thick at the shoulder; thinner sardine-sized fish want two to three. The flesh at the backbone should be opaque and pull cleanly from the bone, about 145F.
- Seasoning quantityA tablespoon of oil and a teaspoon of salt is generous for six small fish. Roll them, then let the excess drip off rather than carrying it to the fire, where it flares.
- YieldSix panfish serve two to three as a main course, more as a first course. Serve with lemon and bread; the butter is the whole sauce.
Ma tre d'h tel butter is one of the small workhorse preparations of nineteenth-century French kitchens that passed wholesale into English and American cooking: butter, parsley, lemon, salt, pepper, kept cold and sliced onto anything grilled. Its usefulness was that it required no stove and no last-minute attention, which suited both the restaurant grill cook and the household that cooked over coals. "Panfish" is an American term for fish small enough to cook whole in a pan, and its appearance here shows a pattern such books favoured: a homely local ingredient finished with a French flourish, the compound butter doing the work of making a perch supper into a course with a name.