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Porgies Saute, Senart
Cut off the fins, trim and wipe six fresh fat porgies. Season with a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon pepper, lightly baste them with a little cold milk and roll in flour.
Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the fish, gently fry for six minutes on each side, and dress on a dish. Pick off the leaves from two branches parsley, well washed, and add to the pan, toss on the fire for a minute, then squeeze in the juice of half a sound lemon, lightly mix, pour over the fish and serve.
A plain fish meunière under a French name. The recipe assumes whole, pan-sized fish and a cook who knows when they are done by feel rather than by clock.
- The fishPorgy (scup) is still sold whole at East Coast and Asian markets, usually 3/4 to 1 lb each. Ask for it scaled and gutted; the recipe mentions trimming fins but silently assumes scaling, and porgy scales are coarse and firmly set. Sea bream, small snapper or branzino stand in without changing anything.
- The milkThe cold milk is not a marinade but a wetting agent so the flour clings and browns evenly. A quick dip and a shake is all that is wanted; soaking gives a gummy coat.
- Fat quantityOne and a half tablespoons of butter will not fry six whole fish. Work in two or three batches with fresh butter each time, or use enough to film the pan generously; butter cut with a spoonful of neutral oil browns less aggressively over the twelve minutes each batch needs.
- TimingSix minutes a side suits a fish of about 3/4 lb in a pan that is properly hot. Judge by the flesh at the thickest point beside the backbone, which should be opaque and lift cleanly from the bone; cooks often pull fish at 130-135F at the spine, though the USDA figure for fish is 145F. Thinner fish will be done in four.
- The parsleyThe leaves go into the hot butter left in the pan for barely a minute, just long enough to crisp and perfume the fat, then the lemon is squeezed in. Longer and the parsley blackens and the butter turns bitter.
- "A sound lemon"Period phrasing for one that is unblemished and juicy, not shrivelled. Half a lemon yields roughly a tablespoon and a half of juice.
- YieldSix whole porgies serve six as a main course, with the sauce amounting to little more than a spoonful of lemon butter apiece.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with hundreds of dishes carrying place and personal names, and Senart is one of them; the name may possibly point at S egion southeast of Paris, though Filippini rarely explains his tags and nothing in the book confirms it. What is behind the name is standard meuniutter, parsley, lemon. The choice of fish is the American part. Porgy was one of the cheapest and most abundant fish on New York's docks in the period, landed by the ton off Long Island and sold whole to households that could not afford sole, and giving it a French title was a familiar way of dignifying a common fish for a restaurant menu.