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Sheepshead, Chambord
Procure a very fresh three-pound sheepshead; scale, wipe dry and neatly trim. Lay the fish in a large sautoire. Season with a tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and one saltspoon Spanish saffron. Moisten with one gill claret, one gill tomato sauce and half pint demi-glace. Cover the fish with a buttered paper. Set the pan on the fire and let boil for ten minutes; then place the pan in the oven and bake for ten minutes. Draw the pan to the oven door, remove the paper and add to the pan six whole fresh shrimp, six heads small fresh mushrooms, twelve small fresh scallops, six large freshly opened oysters and six very thin slices truffles. Cover the fish with the paper again, put the pan back in the oven and bake for fifteen minutes more. Remove from the oven, lift the fish with two skimmers and dress on a large hot dish. Set the pan on the fire, boil the gravy for ten minutes, add half ounce good butter, stir with a wooden spoon until the butter is melted and pour the whole over the fish. Sprinkle a teaspoon chopped parsley over. Arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around the dish and send to the table.
A grand braised whole fish in the Chambord manner, scaled down from carp to sheepshead. The one thing to fix is the timing of the shellfish: fifteen minutes in a hot pan will turn the oysters and scallops to erasers.
- Shellfish timingAdd the scallops and shrimp for the last four or five minutes and the oysters for the last two, off direct heat if possible. Scallops are done at around 115-125F internal and oysters need only to plump and ruffle.
- SautoireA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow pan, essentially a wide sauté pan or a shallow flameproof roasting pan. It must be large enough to hold the fish flat and go from burner to oven.
- A gillHalf a cup, so one gill claret and one gill tomato sauce are 1/2 cup each. Half a pint of demi-glace is one cup. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or any dry red.
- Saltspoon and saltA saltspoon is roughly a scant 1/4 teaspoon, which is right for the saffron. The tablespoon of salt is not: with a cup of demi-glace already in the pan, start with a teaspoon and correct the sauce at the end.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, suits this; the liquid should stay at a bare simmer under the paper rather than boiling hard.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside. It keeps the exposed back of the fish from drying while allowing some reduction, which foil will not do as gracefully.
- The fishSheepshead here is the Atlantic porgy relative, firm and mild. Black sea bass, red snapper, striped bass or a large porgy all behave the same way. Ask for it gutted, scaled and gills removed, head on. The recipe's garnish counts -- six shrimp, six mushrooms, six oysters, six croutons -- indicate it was portioned for six.
- Demi-glace and trufflesDemi-glace is sold frozen or as concentrate and is worth buying rather than faking with cornstarch. For truffles, thin slices of preserved truffle or a few drops of truffle oil stirred into the finished sauce is the honest substitute; truffle-free, the dish still works.
- FinishingThe final ten-minute boil of the gravy is a reduction; take it to a light coating consistency, then swirl in the butter off the heat so it emulsifies instead of splitting. Two skimmers means two wide slotted spatulas, and you will want both.
Chambord is one of the old French grand garnitures, generally traced to the Château de Chambord in the Loire and built around a large braised whole fish -- classically carp, cooked in red wine and dressed with truffles, mushrooms, quenelles and crayfish. This version, from Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book, does what American restaurant cooking of the period did with French models: it keeps the red wine, the demi-glace and the truffle, and swaps the Loire carp for a local Atlantic sheepshead and the crayfish for shrimp, scallops and oysters off the same market. Filippini had cooked at Delmonico's, and the recipe reads like service prep -- weights, pan, paper, the fish lifted with two skimmers and sent out ringed with heart-shaped croutons, a garnish that survives in classical kitchens to this day.