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Sea Bass, Parsley Sauce
Scale, trim and wipe two fresh sea bass of one and a half pounds each. Marinade and cook, dress on hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with parsley sauce separately.
A restaurant chef's shorthand: two of the four steps are cross-references to other entries in the book rather than instructions. Filling those in is most of the work.
- "Marinade and cook" means poach"Marinade and cook" -- The recipe points to two entries elsewhere in the book rather than spelling anything out. For a whole fish of this kind the liquid is most likely a court bouillon of the usual sort: water with white wine or vinegar, sliced onion and carrot, a bay leaf, peppercorns and salt, simmered to draw out the flavourings and then cooled. Whatever the exact liquid, a whole fish of this size is cooked at a bare shiver rather than a boil.
- Timing and donenessA 1.5 lb whole bass needs roughly 12-15 minutes at a bare simmer, measured from when the liquid begins to tremble. It is done when the flesh at the thickest part of the back is opaque and lifts cleanly from the backbone; if you take a temperature, 145F is the usual figure for fish.
- Which fish"Sea bass" in older American cookery often means black sea bass (Centropristis striata), a small Atlantic fish sold whole, though the term was used loosely. Branzino, black bass, porgy or small striped bass all behave the same way; buy two at 1.5 lb each, gutted, gills removed.
- Parsley sauceParsley sauce of this period is generally a white sauce: butter and flour cooked without colour, thinned with milk or with some of the strained cooking liquid, finished with a large handful of chopped parsley added off the heat so it stays green. Roughly 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1.5 cups liquid serves four.
- The folded napkinA service convention. The napkin on the hot platter is usually explained as absorbing the liquid that drains from the fish, so the skin does not sit in a puddle. Any clean linen cloth does it; a rack over a warm platter works as well.
- "Parsley greens"Sprigs of curly parsley laid round the fish, sometimes briefly fried until crisp. Fried parsley must be bone dry before it meets the fat.
- YieldTwo 1.5 lb whole fish serve four, one fish yielding two fillets off the bone.
The terseness is the point: this reads as a working professional's notation, assuming a reader who already knew what the cross-referenced marinade was and could find it a few pages away. Poached whole fish sent out on a folded napkin with a boat of sauce alongside was standard practice in American hotel and club dining rooms of the period, and parsley sauce -- a plain white sauce given colour and bite at the last minute -- was a common English and American accompaniment to boiled fish, cheap enough for a boarding house and respectable enough for a hotel. Black sea bass was then an abundant and inexpensive Atlantic market fish, sold whole and small, which may be why the recipe assumes two of them rather than fillets.