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Weakfish, Hollandaise
Cut the head off a very fresh two-and-a-half-pound weakfish, scale, clean and wipe dry; split it in two through the back and lay in a large frying pan with half gill white wine, one gill cold water and half ounce butter. Season with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon white pepper. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper. Set in the oven to bake for thirty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, dress the fish on a hot dish, arrange six quarters of lemon around, decorate with parsley greens and serve with a hot Hollandaise sauce to which you add one tablespoon of the fish gravy, well mixed in.
A plain braise-in-the-oven method: the fish poaches in its own steam under a paper lid, and the resulting liquor is stirred into the sauce. Two things need translating — the measures and the oven, neither of which the original gives in numbers you can use.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 4 tablespoons and one gill of water is 1/2 cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A covered fish of this kind wants a moderate oven, 350–375F; hotter and the liquid boils away before the flesh is set.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche. Cut parchment to the shape of the pan, butter one side, and lay it directly on the fish so it traps steam without sealing the pan. Foil can be substituted.
- TimingThirty minutes is generous by modern standards for a split 2.5 lb fish. Start checking at 18-20 minutes; the flesh should part cleanly from the backbone. Standard food-safety guidance is 145F at the thickest part, though many cooks pull soft-fleshed fish earlier. Weakfish turns cottony if held in the oven.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is reasonable for a fish this size, but half a teaspoon of white pepper will dominate a delicate flesh and a butter sauce. A quarter teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- The fish gravyThe tablespoon of pan liquor beaten into the hollandaise is the point of the dish, not a garnish. Add it warm and a little at a time — cold liquid or too much at once will break the emulsion. Reduce the pan juices slightly first if they taste thin.
- Buying the fishWeakfish is sold in the US as sea trout, grey trout or squeteague, and it is not always at the counter. Any similar mild, lean, soft-fleshed fish of about the same weight behaves the same way here.
- YieldA 2.5 lb fish, headed and split, serves two generously or three modestly. Make the hollandaise last and hold it barely warm; it will not survive reheating.
Weakfish is generally said to take its name not from the flesh but from the mouth -- the membrane around the jaw is tender and tears easily against a hook. It was one of the cheap food fishes of the New York and Chesapeake markets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which may be why a cookbook aiming at hotel-style cookery for American households would pair it with hollandaise rather than reserve that sauce for salmon or turbot. The technique here follows restaurant practice of the period: fish set in a shallow pan with wine and water, covered with buttered paper, and the cooking liquor folded back into the sauce. Books of this era commonly printed such instructions without oven temperatures.