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Pickerel Soup, Mariniere
Wash and thoroughly wipe a one-and-a-half-pound fresh pickerel, split through back and remove bones and skin from filets. Place the perfect meat in a sautoire with a dozen freshly opened, sound mussels and add one gill white wine, half teaspoon salt, cover with a buttered paper and boil for ten minutes, pour liquor into a saucepan, cut fish and mussels into small pieces and keep on a plate till required. Place all trimmings of pickerel in saucepan with a sliced each carrot and onion, two branches parsley, one sprig thyme, two bay leaves and two cloves. Pour in two and a half quarts water, the juice of half a sound lemon, a teaspoon salt, and let simmer for one hour. Heat an ounce butter in a saucepan, add six finely chopped shallots and fry for five minutes, tossing them once in a while. Add an ounce flour and stir well, then strain fish broth through a cheesecloth into pan, season with a saltspoon cayenne, pour in a gill cream, three tablespoons bread crumbs, and sharply mix until it comes to a boil, add pickerel and mussels with a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, lightly mix and boil for ten minutes. Remove, pour soup into a tureen over six slices of freshly toasted French bread and serve.
A classic mariniere construction: the fish and shellfish are cooked briefly in wine, the trimmings become the broth, and the two are married in a shallot-thickened velouté. Nearly everything hinges on how long the fish spends in the pot at the end.
- The final ten-minute boilAdding the cooked pickerel and mussels and boiling a further ten minutes will reduce the fish to threads and the mussels to erasers. Bring the finished soup to a simmer, then fold them in off the heat and give them two minutes to warm through.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a cup of white wine and half a cup of cream. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon — a real quantity of cayenne in this volume, so add half and taste.
- Sautoire and buttered paperA sautoire is a shallow straight-sided sauté pan; any wide pan with a lid works. The buttered paper is a cartouche laid directly on the fish so it steams in very little liquid rather than poaching in a deep bath.
- PickerelIn American usage of this period, pickerel could mean walleye or a small pike, depending on the region. Any firm freshwater fish will do — walleye, perch, or pike — and sea bass or cod substitutes well if you are buying at a counter. A pound and a half whole yields roughly 8 to 12 oz of skinless, boneless filet.
- "Freshly opened, sound mussels"This means shucked raw from live shells. Buy live mussels, scrub and debeard them, and discard any that stay open when tapped. Cooked in the wine for ten minutes on the half shell or shucked, they will be done well before the fish is.
- The fish stockUse the bones, head and skin but scrape out the gills and any blood, which turn the broth bitter and cloudy. An hour at a bare simmer is longer than modern practice recommends for fish bones; 30 to 40 minutes gives a cleaner flavour, and the volume will still reduce usefully.
- Bread crumbs as thickenerThe three tablespoons of crumbs are structural, not seasoning — with the ounce of roux they give the soup its body. Use fine crumbs so they disperse smoothly; coarse crumbs can leave visible flecks.
- YieldSix generous servings, matching the six slices of toast. The bread goes into the tureen first and softens under the hot soup, so cut it thick and toast it hard.
Marinière — "in the sailor's manner" — signals the same idea in French cookery wherever it appears: shellfish opened in white wine with shallots, the liquor kept and used. Here it is applied to a freshwater fish soup, with mussels borrowed in for depth, in the manner of the professional hotel and restaurant kitchens that produced books of this kind. The dish also shows the older habit of thickening soup with bread as well as roux, a practice that reaches back to medieval European cookery and survives today in Spanish and Provençal soups. Pickerel itself is a reminder of how much American menus once leaned on lake and river fish: walleye, perch and pike were common market fish in the Great Lakes cities, and a chef writing for an American audience could assume readers knew what to ask for.