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FLOUNDERS (au Gratin)
Cut up parsley, shallot, and small button mushrooms, very finely. Fry them in butter, with a seasoning of salt and pepper. Cover the bottom of a flat tin baking-dish, previously buttered, with the herbs, and lay on them a flounder, neatly trimmed, or fillets of any flat fish. Strew bread-crumbs thickly over, and bits of butter on the top of all. Moisten with white wine. Cook carefully. Crisp the top with a salamander or a red-hot shovel. Serve very hot, and with a squeeze of lemon over the dish. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost of flounders, 6d. to 1s. each. Sufficient, one for each person.
A plain gratin of flat fish on a bed of chopped mushrooms and herbs. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no quantities, which is normal for Cassell's — it assumes a cook who can judge both.
- The hinge: don't overcook the fishFlounder is thin and lean, and twenty minutes suits a whole trimmed fish in a fairly brisk heat. Skinless fillets will be done well before that — nearer 8-10 minutes — and will fall to shreds if given the full time.
- Oven settingThe recipe gives no temperature, and "cook carefully" tells us only that the heat wants watching. In a modern oven something brisk but not fierce — in the region of 400F (200C) — will do: enough heat to set the fish and dry the crumb without stewing it in wine.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle heated red in the fire and held over food to brown it. The modern equivalent is the grill or broiler, two or three minutes at the top of the oven. Watch it — buttered crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- The herb bed is a duxellesParsley, shallot and button mushrooms chopped fine and fried in butter is essentially duxelles. Cook it until the mushroom liquid has gone, or the moisture will thin the wine into a puddle and stop the crumbs crisping.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four fish, about 6 oz mushrooms, two shallots, a good handful of parsley, 2 oz butter and 2-3 oz fresh crumbs work. The wine is a moistening, not a poaching liquid — 3 or 4 tablespoons over the whole dish.
- "Flat tin baking-dish"A shallow metal tray, buttered. Any low-sided gratin dish or metal roasting tin does the job; depth is the enemy, since the fish should sit in a single layer with the crumbs exposed.
- Fish substitutionsWhole flounder is not always at the counter. Plaice, dab, lemon sole or witch all behave the same way; thicker fillets such as brill or halibut need a few minutes more and will not be flounder-thin.
- Yield and costOne fish per person, as stated. The 6d. to 1s. price puts flounder among the more modest fish of the Victorian fishmonger's slab, which may be why it is given the dressing-up of wine, mushrooms and a browned crust.
Cassell's dictionary ran through the flat fish alphabetically, and au gratin was the standard way of raising a modest fish to something fit for a dinner course. The method is French in origin and vocabulary: gratin refers to the browned crust scraped from the dish, and the mushroom-shallot-parsley base is the mixture generally traced to the seventeenth-century kitchens associated with the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose name it still carries. What marks the recipe as Victorian rather than modern is the finishing: with coal ranges giving unreliable top heat, browning was done separately with a salamander, or, as here, with a shovel heated red in the fire urup up repitedly in English cookery books of the period and seems to have faded as gas grills became common.