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Progies Saute with Fines Herbes
Neatly scale, trim and wipe six nice small, fresh, fat porgies. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, lightly baste with a little fresh milk and lightly roll in flour. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add fish one beside another, and gently fry for six minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, sprinkle a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over them, a saltspoon each chopped chives and chervil; squeeze over them the juice of a half lemon and place half ounce butter in the pan in which they were fried, toss well on the fire until of a light brown, then pour over fish and serve.
A plain pan-fry finished with brown butter and herbs. Two things in the original need adjusting: the fat is scant and the timing is generous.
- Porgy, or scup"Progies" is a typesetter's slip for porgies — the Atlantic scup, still sold whole at fish markets, often under the name porgy or scup. Sea bream, branzino or any small firm whole fish of about 8-10 oz behaves the same way in the pan.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of chives and chervil, against a half teaspoon of parsley.
- Baste with milkHere this means dip or brush the fish with milk so the flour adheres, not spoon liquid over it during cooking. Milk then flour, shake off the excess, and cook straight away or the coating turns pasty.
- More fat than statedA tablespoon and a half of butter will not carry six whole fish without burning. Use enough butter or a butter-and-oil mix to film the pan properly, and cook in two batches rather than crowding — crowded fish steam and the crust never sets.
- TimingSix minutes a side suits a fish of a pound or more. Small porgies of 8 oz are done at about four minutes a side; the flesh should part cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point. Overcooked whole fish goes dry along the spine long before it looks wrong outside.
- Fines herbesThe classic quartet is parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon, all fresh. Chervil is the one likely to defeat a supermarket run; a little tarragon plus extra parsley is the usual stand-in. Dried herbs are not a substitute here — the point is the raw green flavour against hot butter.
- The brown butterThe half ounce of butter tossed in the used pan is a beurre noisette. Swirl it over a good heat until it smells of nuts and the milk solids are hazel-coloured, then pour it out at once; it goes from brown to black in a few seconds off the heat of the pan alone.
- YieldSix small fish serve three to six, depending on size — one apiece as a main course, or half a fish as a first course. Boiled potatoes and lemon would not be out of place, though the recipe specifies no accompaniment.
Porgy was cheap, abundant and unglamorous along the American Atlantic coast, which is exactly why a book of this kind puts it through a French treatment: sauté aux fines herbes is the standard restaurant handling for any small whole fish, and applying it to scup is a quiet argument that a cheap fish deserves the same technique as a sole. Fines herbes as a fixed idea — soft green herbs, chopped fine, added at the very end so they are never cooked — is generally traced to nineteenth-century French professional practice and appears throughout the grand-hotel cookbooks of the period. The brown butter poured from the cooking pan is the same economical finish used for skate and trout meunière: the pan is deglazed by fat alone, and nothing of the fish's flavour is thrown away.