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Weakfish Au Gratin
Scale, trim fins and cut head off a three-pound fresh weakfish, split open through front, remove spinal bone, wipe well, lay in a lightly buttered baking dish skin side down, season with level teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Finely chop four sound shallots, three well-cleaned, fresh mushrooms, place in small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes. Dredge in a tablespoon flour, stir well, pour in a half gill white wine, squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon and add a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Mix briskly until it comes to a boil, pour sauce and sprinkle two tablespoons bread crumbs over fish, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, set in oven to bake for thirty minutes, remove, place dish on another and serve.
A butterflied whole fish baked under a quick mushroom-and-wine sauce. The recipe assumes you can buy a whole weakfish and that your fishmonger will do nothing for you; both assumptions are worth revisiting.
- The fishWeakfish (Cynoscion regalis), also sold as sea trout or squeteague, is a lean, soft-fleshed Atlantic fish that is not widely distributed inland. Any 3 lb whole round fish with white, delicate flesh works here: branzino, black sea bass, small striped bass, red snapper. A fishmonger will scale, gut and butterfly it in a minute.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 2 fl oz, of dry white wine. Not enough to make a pool; it thickens against the tablespoon of flour into a thick paste that loosens as the fish releases juice.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a fish laid flat and gratinated, 400F is right: hot enough to colour the crumbs, not so hot that the sauce splits before the fish is through.
- Thirty minutes is too longThirty minutes may be long -- a butterflied 3 lb fish lies perhaps an inch thick and will likely be done in 20 to 25 minutes; cook to 145F at the thickest part near the shoulder. Judge by the flesh parting cleanly from the pin bones.
- Shallots and mushroomsFour shallots is a large amount by modern sizing; two or three medium ones is closer to the intent. Chop the mushrooms fine and cook them until their water has gone before dredging in flour, or the sauce will slacken and turn grey in the dish.
- "Place dish on another"This means setting the hot baking dish on a serving platter or underliner before it goes to the table, a service practice used when the cooking vessel is also the presentation vessel. Purely a dining-room instruction.
- SeasoningA level teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for 3 lb of fish is reasonable, but season both cut surfaces, not only the flesh side facing up, and remember the sauce carries no salt of its own.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish, boned, serves three generously or four as part of a larger meal. Lift portions off the skin with a wide spatula; the flesh is fragile and will not survive being turned.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its fish chapter reflects what a Manhattan kitchen could actually buy off the Fulton Market floor. Weakfish was one of those fish: abundant in the Middle Atlantic estuaries, cheap, and gone from the national table largely because it does not ship or freeze well and its flesh softens fast. The name is often explained as a reference to the fish's tender mouth, which tears easily against a hook, rather than to any weakness in the fish itself. The treatment here is straight classical French "au gratin" in the pre-cheese sense of the term: a duxelles of shallot and mushroom bound with flour and white wine, spread over the fish, crumbed, dotted with butter and browned. Escoffier codified essentially the same preparation as sauce duxelles, and its appearance in an American book of 1906 shows how thoroughly French method had been absorbed into the professional kitchens of the eastern seaboard, applied without apology to a local, unfashionable fish.