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Red Snapper, Hunter Style
Neatly trim and bone a three-pound piece very fresh red snapper, season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Finely chop six very small sound shallots, place in a frying pan with a half ounce of butter, and gently brown three minutes. Arrange fish on top, pour in a gill white wine, two branches parsley and juice of half a lemon; let reduce on fire until the liquor is nearly evaporated, add six sliced canned mushrooms, one gill demi-glace and a half gill tomato sauce. Cover fish with lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes, then set in oven twenty-five minutes. Remove, dress fish on a hot dish, remove parsley, pour sauce and sprinkle a little finely chopped parsley over and serve.
A hotel-kitchen treatment of snapper in the chasseur manner: shallots, white wine, mushrooms and a brown sauce. Most of the work is in having the demi-glace ready before the fish goes in the pan.
- The hinge: don't cook it twenty-five minutesThe hinge: don't count on the full twenty-five minutes -- five minutes of simmering plus twenty-five in the oven is likely to leave a boned piece of snapper dry, though much depends on how thick the piece is. Check it early and pull the fish while the sauce finishes; cooks who want the fish fully cooked through should take it to 145F, while many kitchens now pull white fish nearer 130-135F.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So the wine is 1/2 cup, the demi-glace 1/2 cup, and the tomato sauce a quarter cup.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. Moderate, around 350F, is a sensible reading for a dish finished under paper in the oven.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock bound with espagnole, the backbone of the period's sauce work. Good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced homemade brown stock stands in; without it the dish is just fish in wine.
- Buttered paperA cartouche, not a lid: a round of parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish so it steams gently and the sauce still reduces.
- Canned mushroomsThey turn up routinely in professional recipes of this period and are mild by design. Six sliced fresh mushrooms browned separately in butter give a better result; add them with the demi-glace so they don't leach water into the sauce.
- ShallotsSix very small shallots is roughly a third to a half cup chopped, or about two of the large shallots sold now. Brown them gently -- scorched shallot turns the finished sauce bitter.
- YieldThree pounds of boned snapper serves four generously, five at a table with other courses.
"Hunter style" is chasseur -- shallots, white wine, mushrooms and brown sauce -- a garnish that began with game and poultry and was borrowed for fish as French method spread through American hotel kitchens. Red snapper was the prestige white fish of the Gulf, shipped north on ice by rail through the late nineteenth century and a fixture on New Orleans and New York menus, which is how a European sauce comes to be paired with a Gulf fish. The structure here -- sear the aromatics, reduce the wine to almost nothing, mount the dish with demi-glace -- is professional brigade practice written down for domestic readers, one of the small mismatches that runs through cookbooks of this era.