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Pompano, Anchovy Butter
Wipe and cut the fins off two fresh one-and-a-half-pound pompanos and make a few slanting incisions on both sides of each. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and repeatedly turn fish in the seasoning. Place on a broiler and broil on a brisk fire for six minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, decorate with six pieces lemon and a little parsley greens, spread an anchovy butter over the fish and serve.
A plain broiled whole fish that depends almost entirely on heat management and on the compound butter it is finished with. The butter itself is assumed rather than given.
- Anchovy butter is not spelled outPeriod kitchens kept it standing: roughly 3 to 4 oil-packed anchovy fillets pounded smooth into 4 tablespoons softened butter, with a squeeze of lemon and a grind of pepper. Chill it, then lay coins of it over the hot fish so it melts at the table.
- "A brisk fire"This means a hot, direct heat, whether coals or a gas broiler. Preheat the broiler fully and set the rack so the fish sits 3 to 4 inches from the element; a slow broiler steams the flesh and the skin never crisps.
- The slanting incisionsScore through the skin and into the flesh, a few cuts per side as the recipe says. Scoring of this kind is generally done to help heat reach the thicker part of a whole fish and to let the oil and salt work below the skin.
- Six minutes a sideReasonable for a 1½-lb whole fish over real heat, but check rather than count. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone is opaque and pulls cleanly from the bone; many cooks pull it around 135°F, though the official recommendation for fish is 145°F. Pompano is lean and turns dry quickly.
- Keep it from stickingThe recipe's tablespoon of oil is for seasoning, not the grate. Oil the broiler rack or the pan well, or the skin tears when you turn the fish and the presentation is lost.
- Sourcing the fishFlorida pompano runs small; whole fish of 1 to 2 lb are the norm and are sold gutted and scaled. Ask the fishmonger to leave the head on, as the recipe's dressing on the platter assumes a whole fish. Permit, its larger relative, is not a substitute of equal delicacy.
- YieldTwo fish of this size serve four as a main course, or two generously in the manner the book intends.
Pompano was the prestige fish of the Gulf Coast in the years around 1900, ranked by American writers alongside sole and turbot and shipped on ice to hotel kitchens in the North, where it commanded a price to match; New Orleans produced the famous pompano en papillote in the same decades. The treatment here reads as French rather than Creole: a whole fish rubbed with oil and grilled over a brisk fire, then finished with a compound butter, exactly the beurre d'anchois of the professional repertoire, where mashed anchovy in butter was one of a standing rank of flavored butters kept ready to dress grilled fish and meats. That reliance on an unwritten butter, assumed known, suggests a book addressed to a public expected to be following along.