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Pompano, Russe
Trim off fins and lift up filets from two one-and-a-half-pound pompanos. Cut two each medium onions and carrots into very thin slices and place them in a lightly buttered baking dish alternately. Sprinkle two saltspoons salt over, baste with a very little melted butter, then set in oven for fifteen minutes; remove, place filets over vegetables, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and spread over them a half teaspoon anchovy essence. Pour over a half gill white wine and half gill water, cover fish with a buttered paper, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Bring fish to oven door, lift up paper, pour a teaspoon thick cream over each filet, reset in oven for five minutes longer, remove and serve in same dish.
A straightforward baked fillet on a bed of sweated root vegetables, finished with cream. The only real trap is the timing, which was written for a much cooler and less reliable oven than yours.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal in books of this kind. The text offers no guidance at all, so 350F is an editorial choice rather than anything the recipe implies; it works for both the vegetable stage and the fish.
- The timing is the hingeTwenty-five minutes plus five will destroy pompano fillets from fish of this size, which run about half an inch thick. Bake until the flesh is just opaque and separates at the touch — roughly 10 to 14 minutes covered, plus 2 to 3 after the cream goes on.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two are half a teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making a half gill a quarter cup: a quarter cup wine and a quarter cup water.
- Anchovy essenceA thin bottled anchovy sauce of the period, closer to Worcestershire in consistency than to modern paste. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste slackened with a little of the wine gives the same effect; it should read as savoury depth, not as anchovy.
- Buttered paperA round of parchment, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It is a cartouche, not a lid — it keeps the surface from drying while letting the liquid reduce. Foil sealed to the rim will steam the fillets instead.
- Two pompano, four filletsTwo fish of a pound and a half yield four fillets and serve four as a main course. Pompano is not always easy to find; a firm, mild fillet of similar thickness behaves the same way in this dish, though it will taste less rich.
- The vegetable baseSlice the onion and carrot as thinly as you can manage — a mandoline is fair game. Fifteen minutes at 350F barely softens thick slices, and undercooked carrot under a delicate fillet is the usual failure here.
- ServingThe instruction to serve in the same dish is the point of the recipe. Choose a shallow baking dish you are willing to bring to the table, since the pan juices and cream are the sauce and do not transfer well.
Pompano was the prestige fish of the Gulf coast in the years around 1900 — expensive, shipped north on ice, and treated in hotel kitchens with the same French vocabulary applied to sole. The name of the dish carried the prestige that anything Russian had in dining rooms of the era rather than any documented Russian origin. The recipe also shows how bottled anchovy essence functioned in professional kitchens: a half teaspoon added savoury weight to a mild white fish without announcing itself, the role a splash of fish sauce might play now.