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Red Snapper Au Gratin
Remove skin and bones from a three-pound very fresh red snapper. Cut in thin slices, place on a dish. Season with a level teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, half teaspoon chopped parsley; squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon, pour in half gill white wine, turn well in seasoning and let infuse until required. Prepare an Italian sauce, pour a quarter of it into a baking dish, then place a third of the fish over, then another fourth of the sauce, a layer of fish, then the sauce, and so on until finished. Sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits butter on top. Set in moderate oven forty-five minutes. Remove, cut a lemon in half, finely slice it, arrange slices around fish and serve.
A layered baked fish gratin that depends entirely on the sauce you build first. Two things need adjusting: the oven time, which will ruin thin slices of snapper, and the vague "Italian sauce" the recipe assumes you already know.
- Cut the time, not the temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F, but forty-five minutes will turn thin slices of snapper to cotton. Assembled in a shallow dish, it needs 20 to 25 minutes — until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the cheese has taken colour.
- Italian sauceSauce Italienne in this period means a brown sauce (demi-glace) reduced with white wine, shallots and a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms, usually with tomato and chopped herbs finished in. Roughly 2 cups is right for 3 lb of fish. A modern mushroom-and-tomato reduction thickened with a little roux is a fair substitute.
- Old measuresA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper is about three-quarters of a teaspoon. Half a gill is a quarter cup — 2 fl oz — of white wine.
- The layering as writtenThe fractions work out to four layers of sauce alternating with three of fish, beginning and ending with sauce. The top layer of sauce is what protects the fish while the cheese browns.
- The marinadeHalf an hour in the salt, pepper, lemon and wine is enough. Left much longer the lemon juice begins to firm and opaque the surface of the flesh, and the fish bakes drier.
- Buying the fishTrue red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) is frequently substituted at retail. Any firm, lean white fish of similar thickness works here — grouper, black sea bass, porgy. A 3 lb whole fish yields roughly 1 1/2 lb of skinned, boned flesh.
- Parmesan and butterTwo tablespoons of grated Parmesan over a dish this size is a light dusting, which is the intent — it should brown rather than form a crust. The butter dots are what carry that browning; do not skip them.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course. Serve straight from the baking dish; lifted out, the layers collapse.
Red snapper was one of the great commercial fish of the Gulf of Mexico by the late nineteenth century, shipped north on ice in quantity, and it turns up regularly in American hotel and restaurant cookery of the era — which is the register this book is written in. The dish itself is French restaurant method applied to an American fish: *au gratin* here means the classic treatment of a browned top over sauce, and *sauce italienne* is a standard entry in the classic brown sauce family, said to be named for its mushroom duxelles and tomato rather than for any Italian origin, though the origin of the name is not settled. The Parmesan is the element a modern reader is most likely to notice, and grated Parmesan was in common use for gratins in professional kitchens of the period. The recipe calls for a "sound" lemon.