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Sheepshead a L'Aurore
Procure a three-pound piece fresh sheepshead, scale, trim, remove the bones and thoroughly wipe. Place it in a saucepan with a half ounce butter, half gill white wine, one gill water, one teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Cover the fish with a sheet of buttered paper, boil on the range for five minutes, then set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, place the fish in a baking dish. Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon butter with two tablespoons flour and heat for half minute, then pour the fish gravy into the pan with a gill of hot milk; mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then add one finely chopped hard-boiled egg and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well, pour the sauce over the fish and sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over. Set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove, decorate the dish all around with half slices lemon and serve.
A straightforward braise-then-gratin, but the fish spends a long time in the oven by modern reckoning and the book never names a temperature. Both need attention before you start.
- Total cooking timeFive minutes on the range, twenty in the oven, then fifteen more under the sauce comes to roughly forty minutes for a boneless piece — enough to dry out any lean white fish. Poach until the flesh is just barely opaque (a 3 lb piece needs about 15 minutes at 350F), then give it only long enough under the cheese to brown, five to eight minutes, or finish it under the broiler.
- Oven temperatureNo figure is given; ranges of this period were not routinely fitted with oven thermometers, and the book names no oven setting at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits both stages here.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 1/2 cup, so half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup and a gill of water or milk is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making the seasoning 1/2 teaspoon pepper and 1/8 teaspoon cayenne. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the diameter of the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without sealing the pan. Foil is not a substitute — it traps steam and the fish stews.
- Sourcing sheepsheadArchosargus probatocephalus is common on the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts and rarely travels far inland. Black drum, porgy, sea bream, striped bass or any firm lean white fillet of similar thickness behaves the same way in this method.
- The sauceButter and flour cooked half a minute is a white roux — do not let it colour. Add the strained fish liquor first, then the hot milk, whisking; the pan liquid will be well seasoned and salty, so taste before adding more salt.
- Chopped eggAdd the hard-boiled egg off the heat and stir gently. Boiling it in the sauce breaks the yolk down into grit and clouds the whole thing.
- YieldA 3 lb boneless piece serves four to six as a main course. The lemon half-slices around the rim are the whole garnish; the dish goes to table in the same vessel it browned in.
À l'aurore means "dawn" and in classical French cookery normally signals a béchamel tinted pink with tomato — Escoffier's sauce Aurore. This version takes a different route: flecks of chopped hard-boiled egg through a white sauce, warmed with cayenne and gilded with Parmesan under the oven's heat. Sheepshead was a genuinely fashionable fish in nineteenth-century American dining, so much so that the bay where it was once landed took its name from the fish, and the Brooklyn racecourse and surrounding neighbourhood took theirs from the bay. Its firm, faintly sweet flesh stood up to sauced and gratinated treatments in a way that softer fish did not, which is why it turns up repeatedly in hotel and restaurant cookery of the period, dressed in French names for an American clientele.