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Sheepshead, Charleston
Scale, trim fins and remove bones from a three-pound piece of fresh sheepshead. Cut in fine julienne strips two parsley roots, one leek, two branches celery, four medium, fresh, well peeled and cleaned mushrooms and one medium white onion. Place these in a frying pan with an ounce of melted butter gently brown six minutes and place fish over them. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, pour in half gill white wine and one and a half gills tomato sauce. Cover fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on range for five minutes, then set in oven thirty minutes. Dress the fish on a large dish. Reduce sauce for eight minutes on the fire, pour over the fish and serve.
A braise dressed up as a bake: aromatics sweated in butter, fish laid over them, wine and tomato added, then finished under paper. The one thing to change is the timing.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes on the range plus thirty in the oven will take a boneless piece of lean fish well past dry. A three-pound piece about 1 to 1.5 inches thick needs roughly 15-20 minutes at 375F, to an internal 130-135F; check at 12 minutes and pull it as soon as the flesh flakes.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in books of this period. A moderate oven of 350-375F suits this dish; anything hotter will boil the sauce down before the fish is through.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup; one and a half gills of tomato sauce is 3/4 cup. Use a plain, thin tomato sauce, not a seasoned pasta sauce.
- SheepsheadThis is the Atlantic sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus), a firm-fleshed bream common in Charleston waters and rarely on Northern fish counters. Black sea bass, porgy, red snapper or grouper all behave the same way here. Note that "sheepshead" inland means freshwater drum, a different and softer fish.
- Parsley rootsHamburg parsley root, sold at some farmers' markets and Eastern European groceries. If you cannot find it, use a small parsnip and a handful of parsley stems; the flavor is close enough.
- The buttered paperA buttered cartouche of parchment cut to the pan and laid directly on the fish, not a lid. It keeps the surface moist while letting the sauce concentrate. Foil traps too much steam.
- Reducing the sauceEight minutes at a brisk simmer, uncovered, once the fish is out on the platter. Strain if you want it smooth, or leave the julienne in and spoon it over as a garnish, which is closer to the intent.
- YieldThree pounds of trimmed fish serves four to six as a main course.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, assembled by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the habit of that era's professional kitchens: a dish is named for a place to signal its principal ingredient rather than any local method. Sheepshead was a Charleston fish -- abundant around the oyster bars and pilings of the Carolina low country, prized for firm white flesh, and shipped north in ice -- so "Charleston" here does the work that "sea bream" might. The technique underneath the name is French in outline: a bed of julienned aromatics, white wine, a cartouche of buttered paper, and a sauce reduced at the last moment, a standard continental treatment for firm fish. American regional produce fitted into a continental grammar was a premise of hotel cooking in the period.