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Sheepshead, Cracovienne
Take a piece fresh sheephead of three pounds, free it from all the bones, place in a frying pan with half gill white wine, one gill water, half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on the fire for five minutes, then set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, carefully dress the fish on a dish. Finely chop up one hard-boiled egg, sprinkle it over the fish with half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; and squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the sheepshead; place half ounce butter in a frying pan and toss until it obtains a nice brown colour, then pour it over the fish and serve.
A straightforward braise-then-bake for a firm white fish, finished with the chopped egg, parsley and browned butter that older cookbooks called à la polonaise. Two things need translating: the liquid measures and the oven, which the original never names.
- Gills to cupsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) and one gill of water is 1/2 cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; the recipe calls for it twice, once in the pan and once browned at the end.
- The oven temperatureNone is given. A dish already simmering on the stovetop and covered with paper wants a moderately hot oven, 375-400F, so it finishes rather than dries.
- Twenty minutes is too longThree pounds of boned fish in a shallow pan of liquid will be cooked through well before twenty minutes at that heat. Start checking at eight to ten minutes and pull it when the flesh is just opaque and flakes, around 130-135F at the thickest point.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It traps steam without sealing the pan, so the surface stays moist while the liquid reduces. Parchment does the job; foil sits too tightly.
- What sheepshead means hereThe Atlantic sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus) is a lean, firm porgy relative sold mostly on the Gulf and southeast coasts. Black sea bass, red drum, porgy or snapper fillets behave the same way in this dish.
- Boning a whole fish"Free it from all the bones" assumes you are buying the fish whole and lifting the fillets yourself. Three pounds of skinless fillet is a great deal of fish; a whole 3 lb sheepshead yields only about a third of its weight as meat. Buy accordingly.
- Brown the butter properlyCook the final tablespoon until the milk solids turn hazelnut brown and it smells nutty, then pour it over immediately. Off the heat it keeps darkening, and burnt butter tastes acrid rather than rich.
- YieldThree pounds of boneless fish serves six generously as a main course. The chopped egg, parsley and lemon should go on at the table side of the kitchen, not in advance.
"Cracovienne" means simply "of Kraków." In kitchen usage it points to the same garnish that classical cookery labels à la polonaise: chopped hard-boiled egg, parsley, lemon and browned butter poured over at the last moment, a treatment generally traced to Polish cooking and applied in French practice to cauliflower, asparagus and poached white fish alike. The naming reflects how hotel and restaurant cooks of the period worked: a French technical vocabulary, a nationality tacked on to signal the garnish, and whatever fish the local market actually landed. Sheepshead was a common catch on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts then, far more often seen on menus than it is now, and its firm flesh takes a shallow braise without falling apart.