Home › The World's Kitchen › Porgies, West Point
Porgies, West Point
Scale, trim off fins and cut off heads from six even-sized fresh fat porgies. Place in a frying pan with one sliced onion, one branch parsley, a sprig thyme, one bay leaf, one clove, juice of half a sound lemon, an ounce butter, half gill white wine, half pint water, a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Cover fish with buttered paper and slowly boil on range twenty-five minutes. Lift up porgies with skimmer, remove skin from each fish and keep hot. Strain gravy into a saucepan and boil ten minutes. Soak two ounces bread crumbs in gill cold milk, squeeze out milk and add bread to the saucepan, mix well, and boil five minutes. Knead on plate a teaspoon butter with teaspoon flour and add it, little by little, to sauce; mix well while boiling two minutes. Strain sauce through a Chinese strainer over the porgies, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A shallow-poached whole fish with a bread-thickened sauce, in the Delmonico's style. Two things need attention: the cooking time and the strainer.
- TimingTwenty-five minutes at a boil will reduce small porgies to cotton. Whole scup of 3/4-1 lb, gutted and headed, are done in 10-12 minutes in barely trembling liquid; the flesh should just release from the backbone.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer, around 180F, with the surface only shivering. A true boil will tear the fish apart before it is cooked through and cloud the gravy you are about to reduce.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and a gill of milk is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making two saltspoons of pepper roughly half a teaspoon.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on one side, laid directly on the fish. It holds in steam and keeps the exposed backs from drying without trapping enough heat to bring the pan to a rolling boil.
- The fishPorgy is scup, sold whole at many Asian and Italian fishmongers on the East Coast. Sea bream, small snapper, or black sea bass work the same way; anything of similar thickness and firmness will do.
- The bread liaisonMilk-soaked crumbs boiled into the reduced cooking liquor are an older thickener than roux and give a soft, slightly grainy body. The beurre manie finish (butter kneaded with equal flour) tightens it; the recipe has it added little by little and boiled two minutes. Both must be smooth before straining or the sauce will be lumpy.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Push the sauce through with a small ladle rather than pouring, or most of the bread body will stay behind in the cone.
- YieldSix fish serve six as a first course or four generously as a main. Serve immediately; the sauce skins over and the skinned fish cool fast.
Porgy, the Atlantic scup, most likely took its English name from the Spanish and Portuguese pargo, itself from a Latin word for sea bream, and was for a long time one of the cheapest fish on the New York and New England docks and thus a natural candidate for dressing up. Alexander Filippini, who cooked at Delmonico's and compiled The International Cook Book, was working in a period when restaurant kitchens attached place-names and institution-names to garnishes and treatments as a way of distinguishing a dozen otherwise similar preparations on a long menu; "West Point" here signals the U.S. Military Academy and nothing about the ingredients, in the same way as "Washington" served on those menus. The method itself a shallow poach in wine, water and aromatics, the liquor reduced and bound is straightforward classical French, with the bread-crumb thickening marking it as slightly older-fashioned than a flour-based veloute.