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Flounders, Fricasseed
Put the liquor of a dozen oysters into a stewpan with a glass of white wine, and a gill of white stock. Simmer for ten minutes, add a gill of cream, and thicken with flour and butter, then add the oysters. Have ready fillets of flounders or plaice that have been fried crisp and brown in butter or dripping. Lay them in the centre of a hot dish, pour the sauce round them, and serve. Time, ten minutes to fry. Probable cost, 6d. to 1s. Sufficient, one for each person.
A Victorian fish course that is really fried fillets under an oyster cream sauce. The whole thing hinges on the oysters going in last and barely cooking.
- Oysters at the endThe oysters are added after the sauce is thickened and should only heat through until their edges ruffle, roughly a minute or two off the boil. Any longer and they tighten into rubber, which is the one failure this dish cannot recover from.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 142 ml. The recipe uses one gill of white stock and one of cream.
- A glass of white wineA wine glass in Victorian recipes is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml), though the term is imprecise. Keep the pour modest unless you want the sauce distinctly acidic; a dry unoaked white is right.
- Oyster liquorA dozen shucked oysters give perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 cup of liquor, and less if they were shucked in advance. Strain it through muslin to catch shell grit, and top up with fish stock or bottled clam juice if you are short.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any wide saucepan works; wide is better here, since the sauce should reduce a little in ten minutes.
- Thicken with flour and butterEqual parts soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste, roughly 1 tbsp of each for this quantity of liquid, whisked in in small pieces. Simmer a couple of minutes afterwards so the flour loses its raw taste before the oysters go in.
- Frying the filletsTen minutes is for thick whole-side fillets in shallow fat. Modern supermarket flounder or plaice fillets are thin and will need three to four minutes total; flour them lightly and get the pan hot so they crisp rather than steam.
- DrippingBeef dripping was the everyday frying fat and gives a savoury crust, but clarified butter or a neutral oil with a knob of butter is closer to what most cooks will want under a cream sauce.
- Yield"Sufficient, one for each person" most likely means one whole fish per diner, though it can also be read as one fillet each; the recipe gives no separate figure for how far the sauce stretches.
- ServingPour the sauce around, not over, as directed. Sauce on top of the fried fillets will soften the crust within a minute.
"Fricassee" in nineteenth-century English cookery had loosened well beyond its French sense of meat cooked in a white sauce, and here it simply signals fish served in a pale creamy sauce rather than the browned or brown-sauced alternative. The oyster and white fish pairing was a matter of thrift as much as luxury: oysters were long treated as an everyday ingredient in Britain, sold by the barrel and used as a flavouring for sauces, stuffings and pies rather than as a delicacy, though the beds were being fished out from the 1850s and 60s and prices rose markedly through the later century. Flounder and plaice are both cheap flatfish landed in quantity around the English coast and were generally considered inferior to sole, and a rich oyster sauce was one way of raising them. The recipe belongs to the era's habit of building a sauce from whatever liquid was to hand, in this case the oyster liquor that a modern cook is more likely to tip down the sink.