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Pompano Saute, Brown Butter
Neatly wipe two fresh pompano of one and a half pounds each. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Wet them with a tablespoon milk and lightly roll in flour. Heat a light tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, lay the fish in the pan and fry for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, and take all the fat from the pan; place in it three-quarters of an ounce butter and toss on the fire till of a brown colour; pour over the fish, decorate with six "quarters" of lemon and serve.
A plain meunière treatment of whole fish, written for a cook who already knows how brown butter behaves. Two things need attention: the butter for frying is under-measured, and the finishing butter must be pulled off the heat at exactly the right shade.
- The hinge: the brown butterThree-quarters of an ounce is about 1 1/2 tablespoons. Swirl it in a clean pan over medium heat until the milk solids turn the colour of a hazelnut shell and it smells nutty, then pour it out at once. It goes from brown to black in a matter of seconds, and burnt butter is acrid rather than nutty.
- Too little frying butterA "light tablespoon" will not carry two 1 1/2-lb fish. Use 3 to 4 tablespoons, or half butter and half a neutral oil, which raises the smoke point and keeps the flour coating from scorching in twelve minutes of cooking.
- Whole fish, not filletsThis assumes gutted, scaled, head-on pompano of about 1 1/2 lb each. Six minutes a side over medium heat is right for a fish that size; at the bone it should read 135-140F, or the flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone. Fillets need 2 to 3 minutes a side and nothing more.
- Flour at the last momentThe milk is there only to make the flour cling. Dip and dredge just before the fish goes into the pan; if it stands, the coating turns to paste and will not crisp.
- White pepperProbably chosen so no black flecks show on pale fish and pale butter; the recipe itself gives no reason. Black pepper will do little harm to the flavour, though it looks less tidy against the presentation.
- If you cannot get pompanoFlorida pompano is seasonal and expensive. Whole black bass, small snapper, sea bream, trout or Dover sole take the same treatment; keep to fish under 2 lb so the timing holds.
- "Quarters" of lemonSix quarters means one and a half lemons, arranged around the platter. The acid matters with brown butter; it is what keeps the dish from reading as merely rich.
- YieldTwo whole fish of this size serve four modestly or two generously.
Pompano appears in American cookbooks of the early 1900s as a luxury of the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts, shipped north on ice to hotel and restaurant kitchens where it was treated as the equal of European sole. The method here is the classic meunière sequence, milk, flour, butter, brown butter, lemon, which French professional practice applied to almost any flat or fine-fleshed fish, and the wording of this recipe, with its ounces of butter and its instruction to "dress on a dish," reads as professional rather than domestic. That a Gulf fish should be served in a French manner says something about turn-of-the-century American dining, where the raw material could be local while the technique was French. Pompano's other famous appearance, baked in a paper case, is generally traced to New Orleans in the same era.