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Pompano Saute with Fines Herbes
Trim off fins and thoroughly wipe two fresh pompanos of one and a half pounds each. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Lightly baste with cold milk, then lightly roll in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a black frying pan, add the fish one beside another and fry five minutes on each side, then set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, dress fish on a hot dish, sprinkle over half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, two saltspoons chopped chervil and two saltspoons chopped chives. Squeeze juice of half a sound lemon into pan with the butter, lightly toss, pour over fish and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry finished in the oven, with the pan butter and lemon becoming the sauce. Two points need translating: the saltspoon measure and the oven the original never specifies.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons" of chervil and of chives is half a teaspoon each. The herbs go on raw at the end and should be chopped just before serving.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none; it says only "set in oven." A moderately hot oven, somewhere around 400F, would suit a ten-minute finish, though this is an inference and not in the text. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone flakes; 145F is the temperature usually recommended for fish.
- Total cooking timeFive minutes a side plus ten in the oven is generous for a 1.5 lb whole pompano and will dry it. Treat the pan time as browning, then check after five minutes in the oven.
- Black frying panCast iron, seasoned and heavy enough to hold heat when two whole fish go in. Use a pan wide enough that they sit side by side without touching, or fry them one at a time; crowded fish steams rather than browns.
- Milk and flourThe milk basting is there to make the flour cling, not to form a batter. Wipe the fish genuinely dry first, then milk, then a thin dusting of flour shaken off — a thick coat will gum up.
- PompanoFlorida pompano is still sold whole, usually 1-2 lb, but it is not everywhere. Whole small red snapper, black sea bass or trout take the same treatment; a firm-fleshed, mild white fish is what the recipe wants.
- Fines herbesClassically parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon. Chervil is the hard one to find fresh; if it is unavailable, use a little more parsley plus a few tarragon leaves rather than dried chervil, which tastes of nothing.
- The pan sauceAdd the lemon juice off the heat, or nearly so, and swirl — two tablespoons of butter will separate and taste scorched if boiled hard. If the pan butter has browned too far during frying, wipe it out and start with fresh butter.
- YieldTwo whole 1.5 lb fish serve two generously or four moderately, with the fish filleted at the table.
Pompano is closely associated with New Orleans restaurant cooking, and its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book reflects the way American Gulf produce entered the French-trained hotel repertoire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The treatment here is a plain meunière — dusted with flour, fried in butter, finished with lemon and chopped herbs — and the fines herbes mixture of parsley, chervil and chives is straight out of the professional French kitchen, where the herbs were generally added raw at the last moment so their volatile oils were not cooked off. The instruction to use a "black frying pan" is a period detail worth noticing: iron was specified, and the cook was expected to know what that meant.