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Sheepshead, Celery Sauce
Neatly trim a three-pound piece fresh sheepshead, remove bones, place in a frying pan with half ounce butter, a half gill white wine, a gill water, juice of half a sound lemon, two branches parsley, one teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Cover fish with lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes, set in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove and dress on a dish. Have a celery sauce pour two tablespoons fish liquor in, mix well, then pour over fish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A braise-then-bake treatment of a firm white fish, written for a cook who already has celery sauce standing by. Most of the modernising here is arithmetic and restraint with the oven timer.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so this calls for 1/4 cup white wine and 1/2 cup water. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only "set in oven." A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern choice for a covered fish braise of this kind.
- The timing is the problemThe timing -- Thirty minutes total (five at a boil, twenty-five in the oven) is generous by modern habits, though this is a thick three-pound piece rather than a fillet. Fish is done when the flesh turns opaque and flakes; start checking well before the twenty-five minutes are up rather than trusting the clock.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist and stops the thin liquid boiling away. Parchment does the job; foil traps too much steam.
- The panThe pan has to go from burner to oven, so use an ovenproof skillet or shallow pan, cast iron or stainless; avoid bare aluminium with wine and lemon.
- SheepsheadArchosargus probatocephalus, the Atlantic and Gulf porgy with the human-looking teeth, still landed commercially in the southeast. Any firm, mild white fish stands in: black drum, porgy, striped bass, snapper.
- Celery sauceAssumed knowledge in this book: a white sauce built on butter, flour and milk or fish stock, flavoured with celery cooked soft and sieved or pureed. The two tablespoons of pan liquor stirred in at the end is what ties it to the fish, so do not skip it.
- YieldThree pounds of boned fish serves four generously, five at a stretch. Boiled or steamed potatoes suit it.
The International Cook Book belongs to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its short, telegraphic entries read like notes from a professional kitchen rather than instructions for a beginner: the celery sauce is simply assumed to exist. Sheepshead was a genuinely fashionable fish in nineteenth-century America, common enough on Atlantic and Gulf markets that Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn is generally said to have taken its name from the catch, and it appeared on restaurant cards alongside bass and weakfish before stocks near the northeastern cities are usually held to have thinned. The fish is named, by the traditional account, for its blunt, flat teeth, which really do resemble a sheep's and which it uses to crush barnacles and crabs. The method here, a brief poach in wine and lemon under buttered paper finished in the oven and masked with a white sauce, is straightforwardly French service adapted to an American fish, which is the book's whole premise.