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Striped Bass En Court-Boullion
Scale, cut off the fins, thoroughly wash and wipe two very fresh striped bass of one and a half bounds each. Place them in the above marinade for six hours. Place in a large saucepan or fish kettle a sliced onion, a sliced carrot, two parsley roots, a sprig of thyme, two bay leaves and two cloves. Lay the fish over the vegetables, pour in half a gill white wine and just enough cold water to cover them. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon pepper and a tablespoon vinegar. Cover the pan, then let come to a boil. Shift the pan to the corner of the range and let gently simmer for thirty minutes. Carefully lift up the fish with the skimmer, dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with a little melted butter separately.
A straightforward poach, printed at a time when fish was routinely cooked far past the point most cooks would stop today. Two things need attention: the missing marinade and the half-hour simmer.
- "The above marinade"The recipe depends on a marinade given in a preceding entry of the book, which is not reproduced here. Cooked-fish marinades of this era commonly combined oil or wine with vinegar, sliced onion and carrot, and herbs, but the exact formula intended is unknown. Without the original text the six-hour soak is guesswork, and the dish works perfectly well if you skip it and go straight to the court-bouillon.
- "One and a half bounds"A printer's slip for pounds. Two whole bass of about 1.5 lb each, scaled and gutted, serve four.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of white wine. The quantity is small by design; this is a poaching liquid, not a wine sauce.
- Thirty minutes is too longA 1.5 lb whole fish is done in roughly 12 to 15 minutes in barely trembling liquid — figure about 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point. Half an hour gives you chalky, collapsing flesh. Test at the backbone behind the head; the meat should just release from the bone.
- "The corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the coolest spot. The instruction means the lowest possible heat: bring the liquid barely to a boil, then hold it at 160–175F so the surface only shivers. A rolling boil tears the skin and clouds the broth.
- Parsley rootsSold as root parsley, Hamburg parsley or petrushka, common in Eastern European and some Middle Eastern markets. A parsnip cut small, or a handful of parsley stalks, stands in without much loss.
- Fish kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lift-out rack, made for exactly this. A roasting pan set across two burners works; line it with parchment or cheesecloth with overhanging ends so you can lift the fish out whole rather than fishing for it with a skimmer.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin on the platter absorbs the poaching liquid that keeps draining from the fish and keeps it from sliding. It is a practical piece of service, not decoration.
- The bass itselfWild striped bass is subject to size and season limits in much of its range. Farmed hybrid striped bass is widely sold at about the right weight and behaves the same in the pot.
Court-bouillon means "short broth" — often explained as a quickly made aromatic liquid built for one purpose, cooking fish, rather than a stock simmered for hours and kept in reserve, though that gloss is one reading among several. The vegetables, bay, cloves and splash of vinegar are there to season the flesh from outside as it poaches and to keep the flavor of the water from turning flat. Striped bass was a natural fish for the treatment in an American book of this period, prized enough to be served the French way, in one piece on a napkin with melted butter passed separately. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the presentation here is restaurant service scaled to a household range — including the assumption that the cook has a coal fire with a hot center and a cool corner.