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Pompano, Hollins
Cut off the heads of two fresh pompanos of one and a half pounds each, split them in two through the back, remove spinal bones, neatly trim them, then place the fish in a sautoire, skin side downward, add half ounce butter, gill white wine, half gill water, branch parsley, juice half a sound lemon, level teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover the fish with buttered paper and set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove, take up the pompano with the skimmer, lay it in a baking dish. Mix in a small saucepan one ounce butter with ounce flour, heat for half a minute, then strain gravy of the fish into this pan, add a gill cream and gill milk and sharply stir until it comes to a boil. With a small Parisian potato scoop dig out all you can from three good-sized, sound, raw, peeled potatoes, wash well, add them to the sauce, season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon cayenne, lightly mix and let boil for fifteen minutes. Add one egg yolk, carefully mix without mashing potatoes, pour contents of pan over the pompano, sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese over, set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and send to table in same dish.
A Delmonico's-style baked fish in a cream velouté studded with potato balls. The measurements are turn-of-the-century restaurant shorthand, and no oven temperature is given at all.
- UnitsA gill is 1/2 cup (4 fl oz), so the sauce takes 1/2 cup wine, 1/4 cup water, 1/2 cup cream and 1/2 cup milk. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: three saltspoons of pepper is 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for two fish.
- Oven heatNone is specified, as was normal in professional books of the period. Both the initial 15-minute cooking and the final gratin stage want a moderate oven, 350F. If the cheese has not coloured by the end, a minute under the broiler finishes it.
- Sautoire and buttered paperA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan; any shallow ovenproof pan works. The buttered paper is a cartouche — parchment cut to sit directly on the fish — which keeps the flesh from drying while it steams in the wine.
- Watch the first fifteen minutesThis is the hinge. Pompano fillets from a 1 1/2 lb fish are thin, and they get another 15 minutes in the oven at the end. Pull them at 10 to 12 minutes, while the flesh is just barely set, or the finished dish will be dry and fibrous.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. The point is uniform spheres that cook evenly in the sauce; wash them to rinse off surface starch so the sauce does not turn gluey. No size is given; with the small balls a Parisian scoop produces, fifteen minutes' boiling in the sauce should be enough, so check them before the time is up.
- The egg yolkAdd it off the heat, and slacken it first with a spoonful of the hot sauce before stirring it in. Dropped straight into a boiling velouté it will scramble into threads.
- Buying pompanoWhole Florida pompano at 1 1/2 lb is still sold, though it is not cheap. Where it is unavailable, a firm mild fish of similar thickness — pomfret, black sea bass, small snapper — behaves the same way in this preparation.
- YieldTwo fish, four fillets: four servings as a main course with the potatoes counted as the starch.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, for decades a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and his books are full of dishes carrying the surnames of patrons and colleagues — "Hollins" is almost certainly one of these commemorative titles rather than a place or a technique. Pompano itself was the prestige fish of the American Gulf in this era, shipped north on ice from Florida and priced accordingly; Mark Twain had already called it delicious in Life on the Mississippi, and New Orleans kitchens were building their own reputations on it with the parchment-baked pompano en papillote. What dates this version is the sauce: butter and flour cooked briefly, wetted with the fish's own cooking liquor plus cream and milk, then enriched with a yolk and gratinéed with Parmesan. That is textbook French grande cuisine method, and the potato balls scooped with a Parisian scoop are pure restaurant labour — the kind of garnish that made sense only where an apprentice could be set to turning three potatoes into spheres.