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Pompano, 1905
Neatly wipe three very fresh pompanos of one and a half pounds each. Lightly criss-cross on both sides with a small knife. Season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, and rub in a tablespoon anchovy butter. Place on a plate and keep in a cool place till required.
Place in a frying pan one tablespoon butter, half a sliced green pepper, two sliced, peeled and well-cleaned, medium, fresh mushrooms and four finely sliced sound shallots. Cook on a brisk fire for five minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Lay the pompanos over, with all the anchovy butter, pour in half a gill white wine. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, set to bake in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, take up the paper, slide carefully, fish and all, on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward oven-braise of whole fish under a buttered paper. The original assumes you know your oven and your fishmonger, so a few numbers need filling in.
- Half a gill of wineAn American gill is 4 fl oz, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. If you are reading against a British source, a gill there is often 5 fl oz; either way, a scant 1/4 cup of dry white wine is the intent, and it is meant to be a shallow braising liquid, not a poaching bath.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature or oven term of any kind. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, works: hotter and the small amount of wine scorches under the paper; cooler and the fish steams grey rather than setting firm.
- Timing and donenessTwenty-five minutes suits three whole fish of 1 1/2 lb, but pompano is lean and turns dry quickly. Check at eighteen minutes: the flesh should just release from the backbone, about 135-140F at the thickest part. Whole fish carry heat, so pull it slightly early.
- Fish preparation"Neatly wipe" presumes the fish arrives scaled and gutted, head on. Wipe with a damp cloth rather than rinsing under a tap, and score the flanks no deeper than 1/4 inch so the seasoned butter penetrates without opening the fillets.
- Anchovy butterNot a stocked item now. Mash 3-4 oil-packed anchovy fillets, or 2 teaspoons anchovy paste, into 2 oz softened butter with a little lemon; the recipe uses only a tablespoon of it as a rub, and 'with all the anchovy butter' means whatever has come off the fish onto the plate. It supplies much of the salt, so go light on the added half teaspoon.
- "Sound shallots" and the paprikaSound means firm, unsprouted, no soft spots. Four shallots finely sliced is roughly 1/2 cup. The paprika here is sweet Hungarian-style, used for colour and mild warmth, not the smoked paprika of a modern spice rack.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche, cut to sit directly on the fish. Parchment, buttered on the underside, traps steam and keeps the exposed skin from drying while the wine and butter reduce beneath. Foil is not the same thing; it seals too well and the dish poaches.
- Sourcing and yieldFlorida pompano is sold whole at 1-2 lb, mostly wild-caught with a small farmed supply; if unavailable, use whole branzino, small red snapper or black bass of similar weight. Three fish serve six as a course, three generously as a main.
Pompano, Trachinotus carolinus, was the prestige fish of the Gulf and the Florida coast in the era this book was compiled, praised for firm white flesh with just enough fat to survive an oven, and it turns up on turn-of-the-century American hotel menus far more often than in home kitchens. The buttered-paper method here is a plain kitchen cousin of pompano en papillote, the sealed-parchment version generally traced to Antoine's in New Orleans and traditionally said to have been created around 1901 for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont; whether or not that story holds, both dishes rest on the same logic of cooking a delicate fish in its own steam. The anchovy butter, green pepper and shallot base is Franco-American restaurant grammar of the period, the sort of thing a Delmonico's-trained hand would reach for to give a mild fish some backbone, and its presence in a book called The International Cook Book marks how thoroughly hotel French had become the default language of ambitious American cooking.