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Weakfish, Vert-Pre
Procure a fine, fresh weakfish of two and a half pounds, clean well, remove the head and split in two lengthwise. Remove the spine bone as well as the fins. Place it in a sautoire, add one-half gill white wine, one gill water, a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and half ounce butter. Cover the fish with buttered paper, let boil on the range for five minutes, then set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, take up the paper, dress on a hot dish. Add two tablespoons fish liquor to the vert-pre sauce; gently mix, then pour it over the fish and serve.
A plain braise-then-bake of a whole split fish, written for a cook who already has the sauce made. Two things need attention: the vessel and the timing.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and a gill of water is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons 1/2 teaspoon of white pepper — assertive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is plenty.
- The sautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the two fillets flat and safe to move from burner to oven. Any oven-proof skillet or shallow flameproof baking dish does the same job.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the side facing the fish. It traps steam and keeps the surface from drying without sealing the pan the way foil or a lid would.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350°F, is right for this style of shallow braise; anything hotter will boil away the small amount of liquid you need for the sauce.
- Twenty minutes is too longFive minutes on the range plus twenty in the oven will take a boned two-and-a-half-pound fish well past done. Weakfish is a soft-fleshed fish that goes cottony fast. Start checking at eight to ten minutes in the oven and pull it at 130-135°F at the thickest point, or when the flesh just parts.
- Finding weakfishCynoscion regalis, also sold as sea trout or squeteague, is a mid-Atlantic fish rarely seen far from the coast. Black sea bass, striped bass or a firm-fleshed sea trout substitute directly; anything more delicate will fall apart when you lift it out.
- The sauceVert-pre is not made here: you need the book's own sauce recipe. Vert-pre in the classical repertoire is a green-herb preparation, usually a herb butter or a herb-based green sauce along the lines of parsley, tarragon, chervil and chives, though the exact formula here is whatever the book itself gives. Add the two tablespoons of fish liquor off the heat and only warm it through; boiling a butter-based green sauce splits it and dulls the colour.
- YieldA two-and-a-half-pound fish, headed and boned, serves two generously or three modestly.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a man who spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and it shows in the treatment: an unglamorous local fish given a classical French finish. Weakfish was one of the great cheap abundances of the Atlantic seaboard in the nineteenth century, landed in quantity from Long Island to the Chesapeake; the usual explanation of the name is that it has nothing to do with flavour but refers to the fragile membrane around the mouth, which tears easily when the fish is hooked, though a derivation from the Dutch weekvis, 'soft fish', is also offered. Vert-pre — "green meadow" — is a French kitchen term for a green-herb garnish or sauce, most familiar attached to grilled meats served with a herb butter and straw potatoes. Pairing it with a New York market fish is exactly the sort of transaction the book's title promises: local raw material, Parisian vocabulary.