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Striped Bass, Conti
Scale, cut off fins, wash and neatly wipe a three-pound fresh striped bass. Make a few small incisions on both sides of skin, place fish in an oval baking dish with three tablespoons best sweet oil, six finely chopped shallots, a small bunch parsley, half gill white wine, one and a half gills broth and juice of half a sound lemon. Season with a light teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover fish with buttered paper, set in oven forty-five minutes, being careful to baste with its own gravy once in a while. Remove, dress fish on a hot dish, pour sauce into a saucepan, add two gills demi-glace and let reduce on fire to half quantity. Strain sauce over the fish and serve. SADDLE OF LAMB, BRAISE AU RACINES (ROOTS) Season a small saddle of lamb with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover saddle with thin slices of larding pork. Tie with string. Heat two tablespoons lard in a braising pan, lay in the saddle and cook on range to a nice golden colour all around. With a small Parisian potato scoop take out all you can from three peeled carrots and three white turnips and add to the saddle with twelve small peeled white onions; brown ten minutes, add half pint broth, one gill of demi-glace, one gill of tomato sauce, and half gill white wine. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, two branches celery, one sprig thyme, one bay leaf, two cloves, and add to the lamb. Cover pan, set in oven forty minutes. Scoop out as much as you can from three medium peeled raw potatoes, plunge in boiling fat until a nice golden colour, drain and add to the saddle. Reset in oven twenty minutes more. Remove, dress saddle on a hot dish, remove strings and lard. Skim fat from surface of gravy, remove herbs. Pour contents of the pan over lamb and send to table.
Two Escoffier-era restaurant dishes squeezed into one page: a baked whole bass finished with demi-glace, and a barded saddle of lamb braised with scooped root vegetables. Both assume a professional larder, and both assume a cook who will watch the oven rather than trust the clock.
- The timing is the thingForty-five minutes will overcook a 3-lb bass. Whole fish of that size is done at roughly 25-30 minutes in a 375F oven, when the flesh at the backbone reads 130-135F and pulls cleanly from the bone. The recipe's time reflects cooler, less predictable coal ovens; go by the fish, not the page.
- GillsIn American books of this kind a gill is taken as 4 fl oz, half a cup (the imperial gill is 5 fl oz). On that reading half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup, one and a half gills of broth is 3/4 cup, and two gills of demi-glace is a full cup.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual in recipes of this kind. For the bass use 375F; for the lamb, a moderate 350F once it goes into the oven after browning.
- Sweet oilPeriod shorthand for good olive oil — "sweet" meaning fresh and unrancid rather than flavoured. Use a decent everyday olive oil, not a peppery finishing one.
- Demi-glaceA cup of true demi-glace is more than most home kitchens keep. Reduced brown veal or beef stock, or a good commercial demi-glace concentrate, stands in; the point is body and gloss, since the pan juices alone are thin.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of buttered parchment laid directly on the fish. It keeps the skin from drying while still letting the liquid reduce — foil seals too tightly and steams the fish.
- Saddle of lamb and larding porkA saddle is the whole unsplit loin section, a special order from a butcher; two racks or a boned double loin will behave similarly. "Larding pork" here is barding — sheets of fatback tied over the meat, which the recipe tells you to strip off before serving. Sliced unsmoked fatback or caul fat does the job; bacon brings smoke the dish does not want.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. The carrots, turnips and potatoes are cut into small spheres purely for looks; even dice works and wastes less.
- Lamb donenessSixty minutes of covered braising will take a saddle well past pink. For rosy meat, pull it at 130-135F in the centre and let the vegetables finish separately in the pan gravy.
- YieldThe bass serves three to four. The saddle, depending on size, serves four to six with its garnish of roots and potatoes.
Both dishes belong to the grand-hotel repertoire that American cookbooks of the period were busy transcribing: French method, French sauce base, an English or American fish. The suffix "Conti" is one of dozens of proper-name labels in classical kitchen French, often attached to dishes by way of their accompaniment as much as their technique. Striped bass would have been a plausible American stand-in for the loup de mer of the Mediterranean coast, abundant along the Atlantic seaboard and prized enough in the nineteenth century to sustain its own market fishery; the stock later collapsed and was rebuilt under strict management, and farmed hybrid now accounts for part of a market that still includes managed wild harvest. The saddle of lamb braisé aux racines shows the other half of the same training: the vegetables turned into identical spheres with a Parisian scoop, an exercise in uniformity that made sense only in a kitchen with apprentices to spare.