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Brill, Stuffed and Baked
Boil a brill of about seven pounds in salted water for ten minutes, then drain, open carefully, and take out the large bone, fill with veal stuffing, and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes, basting frequently with butter. When cooked, sprinkle a little pepper, salt, and minced parsley on top, and serve with the liquor from the tin poured over. Garnish with parsley.
A Victorian dinner-party fish, cooked in two stages: a brief poach to loosen the flesh from the frame, then a spell in the oven with stuffing where the backbone was. The instructions assume a fishmonger has done the trimming and a cook knows what veal stuffing is.
- The hinge: the stuffing, not the fishVeal forcemeat goes in raw and twenty minutes at a moderate heat will not reliably bring the centre of a thick pocket of minced veal to a safe 165F/74C. Cook by probe temperature at the middle of the stuffing rather than by the clock, and expect considerably longer than the stated twenty minutes on a fish this size.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. If the fish is browning before the stuffing is through, cover loosely with foil rather than raising the heat.
- Buying a brillBrill (Scophthalmus rhombus) is a European flatfish sold mainly in the UK and northern Europe. A seven-pound specimen is a very large one; two fish of three pounds each, or a turbot, or a thick halibut or large plaice, all behave the same way. Adjust timings to the actual thickness.
- Veal stuffingA veal forcemeat of this period would typically be minced veal with shredded suet, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, chopped parsley, mace or nutmeg, salt and pepper, bound with egg; the book will have its own version elsewhere. Ground pork or a pork-and-veal mix is a straightforward substitute; keep it loose rather than packed so heat travels through it.
- "Open carefully"After the ten-minute poach, lay the fish dark-side up, cut along the centre line down to the bone, and work the fillets off the frame on each side without detaching them at head and tail. The backbone then lifts out in one piece and leaves a cavity.
- Poaching the fishTen minutes in salted water is a par-cook only, and for a fish of this size that is about right. Slide it in and out on a rack or a folded cloth; a poached flatfish will not survive being lifted by hand.
- Basting and the pan liquorBaste every five or six minutes with melted butter. The "liquor from the tin" is that butter plus the juices the fish gives up; whisk it briefly before pouring so it does not separate on the plate.
- YieldA seven-pound brill with stuffing serves eight to ten as a main course.
Brill has long lived in the shadow of turbot, and old English cookery books tend to treat it as the cheaper stand-in for that more prestigious flatfish, which is much the same shape and cooks the same way. Cassell's was compiled at a point when railway ice and fast fish trains had put sea fish on inland middle-class tables in quantity, and a book of this kind accordingly carries whole runs of entries on the same fish -- boiled, baked, fried, with sauce, in fillets -- rather than one representative recipe. Boning a large flatfish and filling it with forcemeat belongs to the same tradition as the stuffed and reshaped joints of the period: the point was to send something to table that looked whole and carved without difficulty, which may have suited service where a host portioned the dish in front of guests, though by the later Victorian period dishes were increasingly carved away from the table.