The Taste of Summer

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/magazine/fluke-au-gratin-recipe.html

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The largest flatfish I’ve ever caught was in New York Harbor, just north of the red No. 2 buoy that marks the channel where the tourist boats go to drop off passengers at the Statue of Liberty, a summer flounder the size of a doormat, with bulging eyes. The smallest was closer in size to a salad plate, and it came off a sandbar in a bay 100 miles east of Manhattan. There have been many more of sizes in between. I’m not a particularly good fisherman. But summer flounder, Paralichthys dentatus, are plentiful in season on the East Coast, from Massachusetts south to the Carolinas, and I’ve picked off my share of them. In New York we call them fluke.

I think fluke is one of the great eating fishes: lean, flaky white meat, a perfect canvas for sauce. It is excellent raw, delicious when fried. It bakes into moist perfection. I like it in a sandwich or rolled into a tortilla as much as when it’s prepared in the manner of Dover sole or velveted in a bath of soy sauce and sesame oil. It’s a groundfish that doesn’t taste like a bottom dweller. It’s a highlight of my summer meals.

One of my favorite preparations for fluke is a dish you could make with cod or haddock or halibut, with freshwater trout or catfish, with any white-fleshed and fairly flat fish. It’s a very old recipe, taken from the kitchen of Henri’s Restaurant in Lynbrook, N.Y., opened by Henri Charpentier in 1910. I found it in a cookbook my pal Julie came across in a used bookstore in Wanatah, Ind., “Long Island Seafood Cook Book,” by J. George Frederick, first published in 1939. (Frederick, a president of the Gourmet Society of New York, was a prodigious collector of recipes from the restaurants of metropolitan and coastal New York and a particular fan of fluke, which can, he wrote, “satisfy all but the most academically exacting gourmet.”)

Charpentier was a child of restaurants, born in Nice, France, in 1880 and raised in the kitchens and dining rooms of the Riviera, where he waited on royalty and, he claimed, invented the dish crêpes Suzette. He worked at the Savoy in London, the Metropole in Cannes, Maxim’s in Paris, was a student of Escoffier and of the famed hotelier César Ritz. Soon after the turn of the century, he moved to New York and began a job at Delmonico’s; he later worked at the Knickerbocker Hotel.

America suited Charpentier’s ambitions. Not long after his arrival, he opened his restaurant in Lynbrook, a landlocked village on the South Shore of Long Island, about an hour outside the city. He courted customers from his work in the city, Vanderbilts and Roosevelts among them, along with Diamond Jim Brady, David Belasco, Sarah Bernhardt and other members of New York’s glittery elites. Traveling to the restaurant from Manhattan, whether by car or train, could not have been easy then. Nick Carraway may have passed through the valley of ashes to get to West Egg in “The Great Gatsby,” but the southern route was surely as horrific, pushing east past the hellscape of Jamaica Bay, where horse-rendering plants lined the coast alongside garbage incinerators.

Still, they came. “One pleasant day in 1912, when all I had to worry about were debts and empty shelves in my wine cellar,” Charpentier wrote in his memoir, “Life à la Henri,” “I looked out-of-doors and saw a big Renault car. You can well believe I would tremble at the sight of a mechanism made in France, but I was delighted when Mr. J.P. Morgan stepped out.” Charpentier first met Morgan as a boy, while working at the Hotel Cap Martin in the south of France. “He seemed quite, quite old. ‘Henri,’ he said, ‘there will be 10 of us tonight at 7.’”

Charpentier’s fluke au gratin did not make an appearance that night — he served sea bass to Morgan’s party instead, after courses of caviar and pot au feu, in advance of poussin, salade Monte Carlo and the requisite crêpes Suzette — but it would not have been out of place. It’s an elegant and really quite simple preparation, with fillets of fish baked on top of and beneath a sauce of butter cooked with chopped shallots, garlic, chives, parsley and mushrooms, brightened with lemon juice and white wine, and with bread crumbs, sliced mushrooms and dots of butter strewn across the top. You can make that sauce in the morning, if you like, and assemble the dish for the oven just before dinner, making it a breeze for weeknight entertaining (remember that?). But it’s no stretch to do it all, as Charpentier might have said, “à la minute.”

Prohibition hit Henri’s hard, and business took a turn for the worse. In 1938, Charpentier closed the restaurant and left Long Island for Chicago. According to The New York Times, which reported on his departure, he “blamed high taxes and what he described as the present lack of appreciation for fine food.” Fluke is a good way to reverse that last.

Recipe: Fluke au Gratin