Home › Game › Parmesan Sauce for Fish
Parmesan Sauce for Fish
In a saucepan place one tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of flour, one quarter of a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of cayenne. Stir over the fire until mixed; then add one-half of a cupful of fish stock and one-half of a cupful of cream and stir until smooth and thick. Add four fresh mushrooms, cut fine, or a dozen canned ones, and simmer slowly for fifteen minutes. Strain and return to the fire. Add two tablespoonfuls of cream and one tablespoonful of butter, cut into bits. When the butter is well blended, add two tablespoonfuls of freshly grated Parmesan cheese and take at once from the fire.
A butter-and-flour velouté built on fish stock, enriched twice and finished with Parmesan. The whole thing hangs on the last thirty seconds.
- The hinge: cheese off the heatThe hinge: cheese at the very end -- the recipe has you add the Parmesan and then take the pan from the fire at once; adding it off the heat is safer still. Held over direct heat the cheese proteins tighten and the sauce turns grainy and stringy.
- Straining out the mushroomsThe mushrooms are there for flavour, not texture — they are simmered fifteen minutes and then discarded with the strainer. If you would rather keep them, slice them thinly and leave them in, but expect a rougher, less glossy sauce.
- Fish stockHalf a cup of fish stock is easily made from the trimmings and bones of the fish you are serving, simmered 20 minutes with an onion and a bay leaf. Bottled clam juice diluted by half works; a fish bouillon cube will read as salty and flat against only two tablespoons of cheese.
- Cream"Cream" in period recipes is richer than modern half-and-half, though period sources distinguish thin from thick cream and the intended richness is uncertain. Half-and-half will thin the sauce noticeably and is more likely to break when the cheese goes in.
- Canned mushroomsA dozen canned buttons was the ordinary convenience option of the period. Modern canned mushrooms are brine-heavy — drain and rinse them, and hold back some of the quarter teaspoon of salt until you taste at the end.
- ParmesanTwo tablespoons of freshly grated hard cheese is not much, so it should be good: real Parmigiano-Reggiano or a well-aged Grana. Pre-grated cheese carries anti-caking starch that will dull the finish.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to nap four moderate fillets. It does not reheat well — the second butter and cheese enrichment separates — so make it while the fish rests.
Sauces of this shape -- a roux loosened with stock and cream, then finished with butter and grated cheese -- belong to the same family as the French sauce Mornay, which is made with grated cheese. American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s took up this white-sauce vocabulary as domestic science teachers and hotel-trained chefs pushed it into home use. The alternative of "a dozen canned ones" points to a period when canned mushrooms were a familiar shop item, offered beside fresh without apology.