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Sea Bass, Shrimp Sauce
Trim and neatly wipe two very fresh sea bass of one and one-half pounds each. Place in a frying pan, season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, add half an ounce butter, half gill white wine and a gill of water. Cover the fish with a buttered paper, boil for five minutes on the range, then bake in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, dress the bass, on a hot dish. Pour the shrimp sauce over and serve.
A straightforward shallow-braise: the fish poaches in its own wine-and-water liquor under a paper lid, first on the burner and then in the oven. The only real trap is the timing, which was written for whole fish of a stated size.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 4 tablespoons and a gill of water is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making two saltspoons of white pepper roughly 1/2 teaspoon.
- Frying pan means a sauteuseThe pan needs to be shallow, wide enough to hold two whole fish flat, and safe in the oven. A large straight-sided saute pan or an enameled roasting pan works; the fish should not be crowded or stacked.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. The liquid should stay at a bare tremble, not a rolling boil, or the flesh tightens and the flakes separate.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the side facing the fish. It traps steam while letting some liquid reduce, which a tight lid will not do. Butter the paper generously or it sticks to the skin.
- Total time is generousTwenty-five minutes of cooking suits two 1.5 lb whole bass, which is what the recipe specifies. Fillets of the same total weight are done in 8 to 10 minutes; check at the thickest point behind the head, where the flesh should just release from the bone.
- What fish to buySea bass in this period could mean black sea bass, striped bass or European bass depending on the market. Any firm white-fleshed fish of the right size answers: black sea bass, branzino, or small striped bass, scaled and gutted.
- Dressing the fish"Dress" here means lift the cooked fish onto the platter intact and tidy it, not stuff or garnish it. Two wide spatulas and a warmed dish help; the skin tears easily once cooked.
- The sauceThe shrimp sauce is a separate recipe elsewhere in the book, typically a butter-thickened velvete or bechamel finished with shrimp butter and peeled shrimp. Strain the fish's cooking liquor and add a spoonful or two to the sauce rather than discarding it.
- YieldTwo 1.5 lb whole fish serve four modestly or two generously as a main course.
The technique here is what French kitchens call braiser au maigre or shallow poaching, and its appearance in an international hotel-style compendium reflects how thoroughly restaurant French practice had colonized American cookbook writing: the buttered paper, the wine-and-water liquor, the two-stage cooking on range and in oven, and the sauce made separately and poured over at the last moment are all standard hotel-kitchen procedure of the period. Shrimp sauce for boiled or braised white fish was a fixture on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, appearing in English household books as a butter sauce with pounded shrimp and in French kitchens as a sauce crevettes built on shrimp butter. The insistence that the bass be "very fresh" is not decoration; before reliable refrigeration reached the retail fish trade, the phrase carried real instruction, and books of this era repeat it constantly.