Home › The World's Kitchen › Sea Bass, Piombino
Sea Bass, Piombino
Scale, cut off fins, wash and neatly wipe a three-pound sea bass, place in oval pan with a half ounce butter, half gill claret, one and a half gills water, the juice of quarter of a sound lemon, two branches parsley, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover fish with a buttered paper, place lid on pan, gently boil for five minutes on range, then set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, take up bass and place on a hot dish without breaking it. Pour one and a half gills demi-glace into sauce and let reduce on open fire for twelve minutes. Shift pan to corner of range, drop in little by little a half ounce good butter, mixing continually while adding. Stone twelve olives, place in a small saucepan with six each fresh mussels and little neck clams, with six heads canned mushrooms. Pour in two tablespoons sherry, cover pan and briskly cook for five minutes. Strain sauce through a cheesecloth into this garnishing, mix well, pour sauce, etc., and sprinkle a little chopped parsley over the fish and serve.
A Delmonico's-style braised whole fish with a reduction sauce and a shellfish garnish. The one thing to fix is the oven time: forty minutes will destroy a three-pound bass.
- GillsA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. So half a gill of claret is 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, and a gill and a half is 6 fl oz, both for the braising liquid and for the demi-glace.
- Oven timeFive minutes on the stove plus forty in the oven is far too long. A covered 3 lb bass in a shallow braise is done in 20 to 25 minutes at 375-400F, or when a thin knife slides into the thickest part behind the head with no resistance and the flesh reads about 135F. Filippini's timing would leave the fish well past flaking, which may reflect period taste rather than a slip.
- No temperature givenThe original assumes a range oven with the fish covered and sitting in liquid. Treat it as a moderate-to-brisk oven, 375-400F; the buttered paper and lid keep it from drying while the liquid simmers.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock, an everyday item in a professional kitchen of 1900 and the backbone of the sauce. A good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced dark veal or beef stock works; plain broth will not give the body the finish needs.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to the shape of the pan and buttered on the fish side. It is a cartouche, not a cover in itself — the lid still goes on.
- Mounting the butter"Shift pan to corner of range" means move the pan to the cooler part of the stove, away from direct heat. The half ounce of butter goes in a small piece at a time with constant mixing, kept below a simmer so the sauce does not break.
- ShellfishScrub the mussels and clams, debeard the mussels, and discard any that stay shut after the five minutes in sherry. Six of each is a garnish, not a course; the recipe does not say whether they are shelled or left in the shell.
- StrainingThe reduced sauce is strained onto the shellfish and olives, not the reverse — this keeps the parsley stems and any scale or bone out while leaving the garnish whole. Add the shellfish liquor from the small pan to the sauce; it is the best flavour in the dish.
- YieldA 3 lb whole bass serves three, four at a stretch, and needs an oval pan or roasting dish long enough that the fish lies flat and unbent.
This is from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, the work of a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe is built exactly the way a late-nineteenth-century hotel kitchen worked: braise the fish in a little wine and water, borrow a ladle of the standing demi-glace from the sauce station, finish with butter off the fire, and identify the dish by its garnish. Piombino is a port on the Tuscan coast facing Elba, and dishes named for Mediterranean towns in this period are often said to signal a garnish rather than a documented local recipe — mushrooms, the conventional shorthand for the Italian seaboard on an American menu. The canned mushrooms are worth noticing: tinned goods are generally taken to have been a normal part of a well-supplied professional larder, and Filippini calls for them here without apology.