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Potage, Meuniere
Cut heads and tails off four well-cleaned fresh perch. Finely mince two white onions, place and fry in a saucepan with one ounce butter for five minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with a gill white wine and two light quarts water, add perch, white part of two leeks, three branches parsley and two teaspoons salt, boil for twenty minutes, then lift up fish and place on a plate. Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter, two ounces flour, and stir on the fire while heating for two minutes. Strain fish broth into pan, add a saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well, let slowly boil for fifteen minutes, then skim fat from surface. Dilute on a plate one egg yolk, one gill cream, juice of a quarter lemon, and add to soup. Continually mix for two minutes, but do not allow to boil, then strain through a cheesecloth into soup tureen. Remove skin from perch, lift up filets, cut them in very small pieces, add to soup, mix lightly and serve.
A classic French fish velouté: a quick court-bouillon of perch, a blond roux made with the strained broth, and an egg-and-cream liaison at the end. The liaison is the whole dish, and it is where the recipe can fail.
- Never boil after the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, hold the soup below a simmer, around 175F, stirring for the full two minutes. A boil will curdle the yolk into threads and no amount of straining will bring the texture back.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a cup of white wine and half a cup of cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, meaning a scant quarter teaspoon of cayenne and an eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg.
- "Two light quarts"Read this as a generous but not heaped measure, roughly two quarts less a splash. The volume is not critical since the roux sets the final body.
- The fishYellow perch run small, so four fish give perhaps a pound of whole weight. Any lean white fish works in their place: walleye, pike, haddock, cod or tilapia. Oily fish such as mackerel or salmon will overwhelm the cream.
- Keep the trimmingsThe recipe discards heads and tails, but if they come to you clean and gill-free they are worth simmering in the broth for the twenty minutes and straining out. Perch frames give a good deal of body.
- Twenty minutes is for the broth, not the fishSmall perch will be cooked through in six or eight minutes. Lift them out as soon as the flesh flakes and let the vegetables and wine go on infusing, or the filets will shred when you try to pick them.
- Roux and strainingOne ounce butter to two ounces flour is a stiff, slightly dry roux; cook it two minutes without colour, then add the hot broth gradually to avoid lumps. The recipe ends with a pass through cheesecloth, so do not skip it.
- YieldFour to six first-course servings. It thickens noticeably as it cools and reheats poorly because of the egg, so make it to serve.
Meunière means "miller's wife," and in most kitchens it names a fish floured and fried in butter — the miller's flour being the point. Here the flour arrives as a roux and the dish is a soup, but the logic is the same: a freshwater fish, butter and flour, finished with cream and lemon. Perch is the sort of fish this style was built for, a lean river catch of no great commercial value, and French provincial cooking has a long habit of turning a modest handful of them into something rich by way of a liaison of yolk and cream. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and its French entries reflect the restaurant repertoire he worked in rather than the home kitchens of France — hence the confident assumption that the reader owns a cheesecloth and a soup tureen and will strain the broth twice before anyone tastes it.