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Red Snapper, Demi-Deuil
Procure a three-pound piece fresh red snapper, bone it, trim and neatly wipe. Place it in a sautoire, season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons paprika, moisten with a half gill white wine and one gill water; add two branches parsley. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes, and place in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and keep warm.
Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon butter with one and a half tablespoons flour; heat for half minute, then strain the fish gravy into this; add half gill cream and a tablespoon sherry; mix well. Cut into julienne strips four heads canned mushrooms, half ounce smoked beef tongue, one very small truffle, and add to the sauce. Mix a little; boil for five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream, add to the sauce, continually mixing while adding. Pour the sauce over the fish and serve.
A shallow-braised fish finished with a velouté enriched by egg yolk and cream, garnished with the black-and-white julienne that gives the dish its name. The whole thing hangs on the liaison at the end.
- The hinge: the egg yolkOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not boil again, or it will curdle into grains. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolk with a little hot sauce first, then return it and hold below a simmer just until it thickens.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 1/4 cup and a gill is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making two saltspoons of paprika 1/2 teaspoon.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, wide enough to take the fish in one layer and safe to move from burner to oven. A skillet or a flameproof roasting pan does the same job.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading, but it is an inference, not the book's instruction.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down on the fish. It keeps the exposed top from drying while the small amount of wine and water steams underneath. Parchment replaces the period's kitchen paper directly.
- Cooking timeFive minutes at a boil plus twenty in the oven is generous for a boned three-pound piece; a modern boned snapper fillet will likely be done well before that. Go by an internal temperature of about 130-135F and by flesh that flakes but still looks moist.
- Canned mushroom headsWhole canned button caps, drained, then cut into julienne. Fresh sauteed buttons can be substituted and give better flavor.
- Tongue and truffleHalf an ounce of smoked beef tongue is a deli-counter purchase or can be replaced with a comparable cured meat cut in fine strips. A very small fresh black truffle is the ideal; preserved truffle in its liquor is the practical substitute, and truffle oil is not one, as the dish wants the visible black julienne.
- YieldThree pounds of boned fish serves four generously, or six as part of a longer menu.
Demi-deuil means "half mourning," the term for the black-and-white dress worn in the later stage of Victorian and Belle Epoque bereavement, and in the kitchen it names any dish where slices or strips of black truffle are set against a pale surface or a white sauce. The best-known version is poulet demi-deuil, a poached hen with truffle slid under the skin, generally traced to the cooks of Lyon and made famous by the meres lyonnaises. Applying the same idea to red snapper is the sort of substitution that fills this book: a French garnish vocabulary laid over an American market fish, with tongue standing beside the truffle as one element of a conventional julienne garnish. The technique underneath is standard turn-of-the-century hotel work, a shallow braise whose cooking liquor becomes the base of the sauce, thickened with roux and finished with a yolk liaison, so nothing of the fish's flavor is thrown away.