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Sheepshead, Clam Sauce
Neatly trim a three-pound piece fresh sheepshead, place in a sautoire with half ounce butter, half gill white wine, one gill water, two branches parsley, juice quarter of a lemon, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Cover fish with buttered paper, boil five minutes on range, then set in oven twenty-five minutes. Remove, carefully dress fish on a hot dish, pour a clam sauce over and serve.
A straightforward oven-braise: the fish cooks in a shallow puddle of wine and water under buttered paper, then is sauced. Almost everything that needs translating is a unit or a vessel.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup and one gill of water is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making "two saltspoons pepper" a scant 1/2 teaspoon.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan, wide enough to hold the piece of fish flat with the liquid barely covering the bottom. Any oven-safe skillet or sauté pan of that shape works; a deep pot will steam the fish rather than braise it.
- Oven heatFilippini gives no temperature, as period cookbooks of this kind generally do not. A moderate oven, about 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for this method and timing.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the side facing the fish, laid directly on it. It keeps the exposed surface from drying without trapping steam the way a lid does. Foil is a poor substitute here since the butter is part of the point.
- The five minutes on the rangeThat brief boil is to bring the liquid up to temperature before the pan goes in the oven, not to cook the fish. Move it as soon as the liquid is simmering.
- Doneness over clockTwenty-five minutes suits a thick three-pound cut, but thickness governs everything. Pull the fish at 130-135F at the thickest point, or when a thin blade meets no resistance at the bone; sheepshead is lean and turns cottony quickly past that.
- The clam sauceThe recipe assumes a clam sauce taken from elsewhere in the book; sauces of that name in this period are generally a white sauce or velouté loosened with clam liquor and finished with chopped clams. Reduce the fish's braising liquid and beat it into the sauce rather than discarding it.
- Finding the fishAtlantic sheepshead (the porgy relative with the notorious teeth) is a regional Gulf and South Atlantic catch and rarely travels. Black drum, porgy, striped bass or red snapper behave the same way in this treatment.
- YieldThree pounds of trimmed fish serves four to six as a main course.
The International Cook Book is Alexander Filippini's, and Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York; the method here is a restaurant one, a shallow braise under buttered paper that a professional would use for any firm white fish sent out with a sauce over it. Sheepshead was a genuine market staple in nineteenth-century American cities, particularly along the mid-Atlantic and Gulf coasts, prized for firm sweet flesh and named for its teeth, which resemble a sheep's and which it uses to crush barnacles and shellfish. Whatever the reasoning, the pairing suits the fish: the clam liquor supplies the salinity that a lean, mild fish lacks on its own. The Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay is generally said to take its name from the same fish, whose local numbers had fallen off by the time this book appeared in 1906.