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Pompano, Villeroi
Lift up the filets from two fresh one-and-a-half-pound pompanos, skin them, season with a half teaspoon of salt, two saltspoons white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; then turn the filet in the Villeroi sauce and gently roll them in fresh bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, arrange the filets one beside another in the pan and gently fry for five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A classic à la Villeroi treatment: fish masked in a thick sauce, crumbed and fried. The recipe assumes you already know the sauce and, more importantly, that it must be cold before it goes anywhere near breadcrumbs.
- Chill the coating firstVilleroi sauce is a velouté or allemande reduced until very thick and enriched with egg yolk. Dip the filets while it is warm, then lay them on an oiled tray and refrigerate at least an hour until the coating is firm. Crumbing a warm, soft sauce gives a mess in the pan; this is the hinge of the dish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp white pepper and 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg for four filets, which is a heavy hand with pepper by current taste.
- The sauce is not given hereThe recipe assumes a Villeroi sauce made elsewhere: a velouté or allemande reduced hard, enriched with egg yolk, strained, and cooled to a spreadable paste. Quantities are not specified in this recipe.
- PompanoFlorida pompano is still sold but is expensive and often frozen. Any firm, mild, moderately fatty filet works -- sole, black sea bass, or trout -- cut to roughly the same thickness so the frying time holds.
- Frying time and fatFive minutes a side suits a thick coated filet in a moderate pan. Thin filets under a set crust need three to four minutes a side over medium heat; the coating browns before the fish overcooks. Two tablespoons of butter is little fat for two pans' worth of filets and will brown quickly -- clarified butter, or butter with a neutral oil, and more of it, is easier to manage.
- Double crumbingFor a crust that survives the turn, pat the sauced filets in crumbs, then egg-wash and crumb a second time. The recipe as written calls for a single roll in fresh bread crumbs.
- The folded napkinFried food was dressed on a linen napkin folded on the platter to absorb fat and keep the crust from steaming. A wire rack does the same job; the napkin is presentation.
- YieldTwo 1 1/2-lb pompanos give four filets — two generous or four modest servings as a fish course.
The name is often said to honor the Villeroy family of French marshals, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the technique — masking a cooked or raw item in a thick, egg-enriched velout hen and chilening and frying — was codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking and passed intact into American hotel kitchens. It is a labor-intensive way to eat fish, and it is generally understood that such dishes suited grand menus, where the smooth sauce sealed under a crisp crust suggested a kitchen with time and a saucier. Pompano is often described as a prestige Gulf fish of the American table in this period, treated with the same French vocabulary applied to sole in Paris. Its appearance in a book calling itself international is characteristic of the era, when the world's kitchen, as understood by an American chef, largely meant the French repertoire applied to local fish.