Home › The Principles of Cookery › Brill, to Boil
Brill, to Boil
This fish closely resembles the turbot, and is boiled in the same manner. Choose a thick fish, and see that it is quite fresh, which may be known by the yellowish hue of the flesh. Clean, cut off the fins, and, in order to preserve its whiteness, rub it over with the juice of a lemon and a little salt. Put it into a fish-kettle with water to cover, and salt in the proportion of three ounces to each gallon of water. Add a little vinegar, bring it to a boil, and continue to simmer gently until the fish is done. Lay it on a dish the white side up. Garnish in the usual way, and serve on a napkin. Time, twenty minutes to boil a brill of four pounds' weight. Brill may also be fried whole or in fillets like a sole.
A plain court-bouillon poach for a flatfish that most fishmongers can still order in. The only real problem with the instruction as written is the timing, which belongs to an era that liked its fish firm.
- The hinge: never let it boilBring the kettle just to the point of trembling and hold it there. A rolling boil shreds the delicate flakes of brill and drives the flesh away from the bone before the centre is warm.
- TimingTwenty minutes for a 4 lb brill is generous by current practice. Reckon on roughly 8 to 10 minutes per inch at the thickest part, measured from the moment the water comes up to a simmer, and check at the backbone; 55-60C at the centre is done. A whole 4 lb fish will usually be ready in 12 to 15 minutes.
- The salt proportionThree ounces to the gallon is about 85 g, and in an imperial gallon of roughly 4.5 litres that works out a little under a 2 per cent brine. That is deliberate: it seasons the flesh from the outside and keeps it from leaching flavour into the water. Do not reduce it, and add the splash of vinegar as directed, which is held to firm the surface of the flesh and keep it white.
- No fish kettleA deep roasting tin across two burners works, covered with foil. Alternatively lay the fish on a rack in the tin, pour in the hot brine to cover, and hold it in a 325F oven, where the temperature is far easier to keep below a boil.
- White side upBrill is a flatfish with a mottled grey-brown top and a white underside. Serving it white side up is not just presentation; it lets you lift the top fillets cleanly off the frame at the table.
- "Garnish in the usual way"For Victorian readers that typically meant picked parsley and lemon, and sometimes lobster coral or fried smelts. The folded napkin under the fish is there to soak up poaching liquor so the platter does not flood.
- Sauce is assumedThe book takes for granted that boiled white fish arrives with something poured over it: melted butter, shrimp or lobster sauce, or a caper and butter sauce. Poached brill on its own is very lean eating.
- YieldA 4 lb brill serves four to six as a main course. If you cannot get one that size, two smaller fish poached side by side behave the same way; just shorten the time.
Brill has long been the turbot's cheaper neighbour, and Victorian cookery books treat it exactly that way — Cassell's does not even give it a method of its own, simply pointing back to the turbot entry. Both are North Atlantic flatfish caught in the same grounds and landed together, and turbot's prestige on the nineteenth-century English table (it had its own diamond-shaped copper kettle, the turbotière, which a well-equipped large kitchen might keep) is generally said to have meant brill was often bought as the affordable substitute for a dinner party. The dedicated fish kettle assumed here is itself a marker of period: a household with a range and a cook could keep a long lidded pan with a perforated draining plate purely for poaching whole fish, and the plate is what makes it possible to lift four pounds of cooked flatfish out in one piece. Serving on a folded napkin was standard English service for any boiled fish through the late 1800s, and survived on hotel menus well into the twentieth century.