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Baked Gurnet
Clean and dry the gurnet; make a stuffing of bread crumbs, a little suet, minced parsley, sweet herbs, pepper and salt, and the yolk of an egg; stuff the fish, put into a baking dish with pieces of dripping and a little water; bake in a quick oven for about an hour, basting constantly. Serve with shrimp sauce.
A plain Victorian baked whole fish, written for cooks who bought gurnard because it was cheap. The main thing to fix is the time: an hour will destroy it.
- Bake it far less than an hourA stuffed gurnard of 1.5-2 lb is done in 25-35 minutes at 400F, when the flesh lifts cleanly from the backbone. The original hour may assume a larger fish and an uneven coal-fired oven; either way it is longer than a modern cook needs.
- "Quick oven"425-450F. If you are following the shortened timing above, 400F is a safer bet for a stuffed fish, since the stuffing needs to reach 165F while the flesh is still moist.
- Gurnet is gurnardSold as red or grey gurnard, or in France as grondin. It is a firm, sweet, bony fish with a large armoured head and vicious dorsal spines — have the fishmonger trim them and gut it. Any small firm whole fish substitutes: red mullet, small snapper, sea bream, black bass.
- Suet and drippingSuet is raw beef kidney fat, shredded; dripping is the rendered fat saved from roasts. Cold butter, grated or diced, does the same job in both places, and beef dripping is worth using if you have it for the flavour it gives the pan juices.
- The stuffing needs measuringFor a 2 lb fish: about 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons grated suet or butter, 2 tablespoons parsley, a teaspoon of mixed thyme and marjoram, salt, pepper, one egg yolk. Pack it loosely into the cavity; it swells.
- "Sweet herbs"The standard nineteenth-century trio was thyme, marjoram and savory, with parsley counted separately. Not sweet in the sense of sugared — simply the mild culinary herbs as opposed to bitter ones.
- Basting constantlyThere is very little fat here, so the water and dripping in the dish reduce fast. Add a splash more water if the pan threatens to go dry, or cover loosely with foil for the first half and finish uncovered.
- Shrimp sauceIn this period, a butter-and-flour white sauce or thin béchamel with chopped cooked brown shrimp folded in, sharpened with a little anchovy essence and cayenne. Small cooked cold-water shrimp in a plain béchamel gets you there.
- YieldOne fish of this size serves two, or one as a full main course. Scale the stuffing rather than the timing if you bake two.
Gurnard was for centuries a poor man's fish in Britain and Ireland: abundant, ugly, largely bone and head, and often thrown back or sold for pennies when it appeared in the trawl alongside more valuable soles and turbot. That is exactly why it turns up in a general household compendium like this one — such books leaned on cheap fish, and the stuffing-and-bake treatment here is the same one applied to haddock, hake and any other firm whole fish of the day. The shrimp sauce is the period's near-automatic partner for baked white fish, a reminder of how much brown shrimp was landed and potted around the English coast. Gurnard's modern reappearance on restaurant menus, generally credited to the sustainable-fishing campaigns of the past two decades, is a rehabilitation rather than a discovery; cooks like the compiler of this book knew perfectly well what to do with it.