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Sea Bass, Saute, Meuniere
Scale, trim off fins and neatly wipe two small sea bass of one and a half pounds each. Make three light incisions in skin on each side of both fish. Season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Lightly baste with a little cold milk and roll in a little flour.
Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add fish, and fry ten minutes on each side. Then set in oven five minutes. Remove, dress on a dish, place a half ounce butter in the pan and toss until a light brown, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and juice of half a sound lemon, toss a little, then pour over the fish and serve.
A classic whole-fish meunière, written for a cook who already knows how to turn a fish without breaking it. Two details need attention: the fat and the oven temperature.
- The butter will burnOne tablespoon of whole butter cannot survive twenty minutes in a hot pan. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and keep a fresh half ounce back for the finishing sauce. That second addition, browned to the colour of hazelnut and cut with lemon, is the whole point of meunière.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A hot oven of about 425F for the final five minutes finishes the thickest part at the backbone without drying the flanks.
- The slashes matterThe three shallow cuts on each side are not decorative. They let heat into the thickest muscle so the shoulder cooks at the same rate as the tail, and they keep the skin from curling and lifting the fish off the pan.
- Milk then flourThe cold milk wash is there to make the flour cling in an even film. Flour just before the fish goes in the pan; if it sits, the coating turns to paste and will not crisp.
- Cooking timeTwenty minutes of pan time plus five in the oven is generous for a 1.5 lb fish. Check at fifteen: the flesh at the spine should be opaque and lift cleanly, around 130-135F. Modern taste stops well short of the flaking-dry fish of 1911.
- Fish choiceBlack sea bass at 1.5 lb whole is still sold at good fishmongers. Branzino, porgy or small snapper can be handled much the same way. Have it scaled and gutted, and dry the cavity as well as the skin.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper is for two whole fish inside and out, not per pound of flesh. Salt the cavity too.
- YieldTwo fish of this size serve two generously, or four as a first course. Serve immediately; browned butter dulls within a minute or two of hitting the plate.
Meunière is generally glossed as "in the manner of the miller's wife" — the reference is to the dusting of flour that gives the fish its crust and, by way of the pan, thickens the butter sauce very slightly. It appears here in Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (1911); Filippini had spent many years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York. The formula is deliberately spare: the flour, the butter, the parsley, the lemon. Filippini's "a sound lemon" reflects a period habit of specifying unblemished fruit.