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Striped Bass, Caper Sauce
Thoroughly wipe two fine, fresh striped bass of one and a half pounds each. Place them in a sautoire with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, half gill white wine, one gill hot water and half ounce butter. Cover the fish with a sheet of lightly buttered paper and let boil for five minutes; then set the pan in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove and keep hot. Heat one tablespoon butter in a small saucepan, add two tablespoons flour; stir well while heating for a minute, then pour in the liquor of the fish with three-quarters of a gill hot milk; mix well until it comes to a boil, then add two tablespoons capers; mix well and boil for one minute. Dilute one egg yolk in a tablespoon cold milk and add to the sauce; mix well for half minute without boiling. Dress the bass on a hot dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A restaurant-style poach-then-bake for whole fish, finished with a flour-thickened sauce and an egg-yolk liaison. The hinge is that last step: once the yolk goes in, the sauce must not boil.
- The liaisonAfter the egg yolk is stirred in, keep the sauce below a simmer — roughly 180F — and off direct heat if need be. A boil scrambles the yolk and leaves the sauce grainy.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, one gill of hot water is 1/2 cup, and three-quarters of a gill of milk is 6 tablespoons.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan or shallow braiser, wide enough to hold both fish flat without crowding. It must be ovenproof, since the same pan goes into the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Use 400F; the fish is already hot from its five minutes on the stovetop and only needs to finish through.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche — a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down on the fish. It traps steam and keeps the top from drying. Foil works but presses more heat onto the skin.
- Doneness over timingFifteen minutes suits two 1 1/2-lb whole fish, but pan and oven vary. The flesh should reach 130-135F at the thickest point behind the head and lift cleanly from the backbone.
- The roux is flour-heavyTwo tablespoons flour to one of butter gives a stiff paste and a thick sauce. Add the fish liquor gradually and thin with a little more hot milk if it tightens past coating consistency.
- CapersModern capers come in strong brine or salt. Drain and rinse brined capers, and soak salt-packed ones for ten minutes, or the finished sauce will need no added salt at all — and may already have too much, given the teaspoon in the poaching liquid.
- The fish itselfWild striped bass is tightly regulated along the American Atlantic coast and often size-restricted. Farmed hybrid striped bass runs 1 1/2 to 2 lb whole and is the practical substitute; branzino or black sea bass behave the same way.
- YieldTwo whole fish of this size serve four as a main course, one fish split between two plates.
Striped bass was a major table fish of the nineteenth-century American Atlantic seaboard, sold in New York markets under both its own name and the Chesapeake trade name rockfish, and it appears on the menus of the city's restaurants of the period. The treatment here is thoroughly French rather than American: a brief shallow poach under buttered paper, the cooking liquor reused as the base of a white sauce, and a final egg-yolk liaison to enrich it, a technique that turns a plain velouté into something closer to a sauce allemande. The capers are the older half of the dish; the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa had been shipped north from the Mediterranean for centuries and were a standard sharp counterweight to boiled fish and boiled mutton alike in English and American kitchens long before this recipe was written down.