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Gurnet, or Gurnard, Baked
The gurnet is a nicely-flavoured fish, with firm white flesh, of an agreeable flavour. The head is very large, compared with the rest of the body. The most usual way of dressing it is to stuff and bake it. Clean it thoroughly, and cut off the gills. Fill it with a good veal forcemeat, sew up the body, and fasten the tail securely into the mouth of the fish. Butter a pie-dish, put in the fish, cover it with slices of bacon, and bake in a quick oven for half an hour or more. Serve with anchovy or parsley sauce. Sufficient, a moderate-sized fish for three persons. Probable cost, uncertain.
A whole stuffed fish baked under a blanket of bacon, written for a cook who was expected to know what veal forcemeat was and how long a fish takes. Two things need attention: the fish itself, and the oven time.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat a moderate stuffed gurnard should be done in about 25-35 minutes; the book gives no weight, and the "or more" presumably allows for a larger fish.
- Judging donenessThe flesh should be opaque and lift cleanly from the backbone, and the centre of the forcemeat should reach 165F since it contains raw ground meat. Firm-fleshed fish stands up to baking better than most, but it still dries out if you go by the clock alone.
- Buying the fishGurnard is sold as sea robin in the United States and is often available whole and cheap where it is landed at all. Red mullet, small snapper, black bass or trout of the same weight all take this treatment. Remember the enormous head: a 2 lb gurnard yields much less meat than 2 lb of most other fish.
- Veal forcemeatA period forcemeat means finely chopped or ground veal worked with breadcrumbs, suet or butter, chopped parsley, lemon zest, mace or nutmeg, and egg to bind. A sausage-meat or veal-and-pork stuffing does the same job. Pack it loosely; it swells.
- Sewing and trussingCoarse cotton thread and a trussing needle, or two or three short skewers laced with string. Curling the tail into the mouth is the old "en colere" presentation and is decorative rather than functional; skip it if the fish is stiff, and never force it, as the body will split and the stuffing escape.
- The baconStreaky bacon laid over the fish bards it and keeps the exposed flesh from drying. Use thin slices and lift them off for the last five minutes if you want any colour on the skin; bacon is salty, so salt the forcemeat lightly.
- Pie-dishAny shallow buttered baking dish that holds the fish without bending it. Gurnard has hard bony plates and sharp spines along the head and gill covers; handle it with a cloth.
- The saucesAnchovy sauce is a butter-and-flour white sauce, made with fish stock or milk, seasoned with anchovy paste or mashed fillets and a little lemon; parsley sauce is the same base with a generous handful of chopped parsley. Both are made while the fish bakes.
- YieldAs the book says, three servings from a moderate fish. Scale up with two smaller fish rather than one large one if you are feeding more, since a very large gurnard bakes unevenly around the stuffing.
Gurnard was for centuries a cheap fish in Britain, unfashionable because of its armoured, disproportionately large head and low yield of flesh, and it turns up in Victorian household books precisely because it was affordable. The admission that the "probable cost" is "uncertain" is telling: such dictionaries priced most ingredients to the penny, but gurnard was a bycatch fish whose price depended entirely on what the local boats happened to bring in. The name is generally traced to the Old French gornart, from a root meaning to grunt, after the drumming noise the fish makes with its swim bladder when landed; "gurnet" is a variant form, common in English cookery books into the nineteenth century and now largely gone. Stuffing a whole fish with a meat forcemeat, barding it with bacon and serving it with anchovy sauce is a thoroughly English treatment of the period, applied more or less identically to pike, haddock and carp, and it made a lean, bony fish read as a substantial dish at table.