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Weakfish, Paysanne
Cut off the head of a fresh three-pound weakfish. Split in two and remove the spinal bone; place in a roasting tin, cut part upward. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, dredge four finely chopped, sound shallots and divide an ounce of butter in small bitsover the fish; set in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, squeeze the juice of half a sound lemon over, dress on a hot dish, pour the butter over and serve.
A plain baked split fish with shallots and butter, of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how a fish should look when it is done. Two things are missing from the text: the oven temperature and the yield.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given; the text leaves it to the cook. A moderately hot oven, somewhere around 400F, is a reasonable modern reading, and twenty-five minutes at that heat should bring a thick side of a three-pound fish to roughly 135-140F at the backbone.
- WeakfishCynoscion regalis, also sold as sea trout or squeteague on the Atlantic coast. It is soft-fleshed and does not travel well, so if the fishmonger has none, use two pounds of striped bass, black drum, or a whole branzino or two; avoid anything as lean and firm as cod, which behaves differently under dry heat.
- "Cut part upward"Flesh side up, skin down on the tin. The skin protects the fish from the metal and the butter bastes the exposed surface. Do not turn it.
- "Sound" shallots and lemonPeriod usage for unblemished and unspoiled, a routine caution when produce was bought loose and kept in a cellar. Nothing to act on beyond ordinary selection.
- "Dredge" the shallotsHere it means scatter over, not coat in flour. Chop them fine so they soften in the time given; coarse shallot will still be raw and harsh at the end.
- ButterOne ounce is two tablespoons, which is thin cover for three pounds of fish. Doubling it gives you enough pan butter to actually pour over at the end, which is the point of the dish.
- Splitting the fishAsk the fishmonger to head the fish and butterfly it, removing the spine. If you do it yourself, run a knife along both sides of the backbone from the inside and lift it out with the ribs; check for pin bones before seasoning.
- YieldA three-pound whole weakfish, headed and boned, serves two generously or three modestly. Serve straight from the oven with the pan butter and lemon spooned over.
Weakfish is generally said to take its name not from its flesh but from its mouth: the membrane is tender and tears easily against a hook. Along the mid-Atlantic it was also called squeteague, from a Narragansett word, and marketed as sea trout. Paysanne is the French kitchen's label for country or peasant treatment, generally meaning few ingredients and no sauce beyond the fat the dish cooks in, and here it amounts to butter, shallot and lemon. Its appearance under a French name in a book of this sort reflects the professional American kitchen of the period, in which restaurant cooking was conducted in French vocabulary while the fish itself came off the local docks; weakfish was one of the standard Atlantic market fish of the early 1900s and would have needed no introduction to a New York cook.