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Halibut, Curried Slices Of
Take four pounds of halibut, cut it into slices three-quarters of an inch in thickness. Leave the skin on, flour them well, and fry in hot butter or lard till they are brightly browned. Have ready a pint of good beef stock, nicely flavoured. Thicken it with a table-spoonful of curry-powder, and a table-spoonful of ground rice, mixed smoothly with a little stock, and afterwards added to the rest. Let it boil, and put with it a quarter of a pint of good cream or new milk. Stew the slices of fish until they are tender, pile them on a hot dish, let the sauce boil, and pour it hot over them. Serve with a border of boiled rice round the dish. Time, altogether, one hour. Probable cost, 6d. or 8d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A straightforward brown-and-stew curry, but the timing is the thing that will ruin it. Halibut is lean and dries out fast, and an hour of stewing will leave you with cotton wool.
- Cut and quantityFour pounds of halibut cut three-quarters of an inch thick means ordinary steaks or thick fillet portions, perhaps eight pieces depending on the width of the fish. Halibut is expensive now in a way it was not when this was written; cod, hake or haddock behaves the same way in the pan.
- The hinge: stewing time"Time, altogether, one hour" covers the frying, the sauce and the stewing together, not an hour of simmering. Once the slices go into the sauce they need 5 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer until the flesh just parts; anything more and the fish turns fibrous and sheds into the sauce.
- Imperial measuresA pint of stock is 20 fl oz here (2 1/2 US cups), and a quarter of a pint of cream is 5 fl oz, or a generous half cup. The recipe is British and its pints are imperial throughout.
- Ground riceCoarsely milled rice, the same thing sold in Britain as ground rice for puddings; fine rice flour will do the same job here. The recipe already tells you to mix it smoothly with a little stock before it goes into the pan, which is what stops it lumping. A tablespoon in a pint gives a light coating sauce, not a thick one.
- Beef stock with fishNot an error. British curry recipes of this period often called for whatever household stock was to hand, beef or veal included, regardless of the main ingredient. If it reads oddly to you, a light chicken stock or a half-and-half stock and fish stock gives the same body with less clash.
- Cook the curry powderCommercial curry powder needs heat to lose its raw, dusty edge. Fry it for a minute in a spoonful of the pan butter before the stock goes in, rather than stirring it into hot liquid as written.
- After the cream goes inThe instruction to "let the sauce boil" once more applies to a sauce enriched with cream, which will separate if held at a rolling boil. Bring it just to a bubble to tighten it and pour at once.
- Skin and flourLeaving the skin on holds the slices together through both the frying and the stewing. Flour them just before they hit the fat; floured fish left standing goes gummy and will not brown.
- ServingSix to eight as written, which is generous. The rice border is the whole starch component, so allow 2 to 3 cups uncooked rice for that number.
Curried fish of this kind belongs to the long British domestication of Indian cooking, in which a bought curry powder, a flour or rice-flour thickened stock and a ring of plain boiled rice became a standard way of dressing almost anything in the larder. Cassell's places the recipe among its alphabetical fish entries as one of several halibut treatments, which tells you something about how the fish was regarded: firm, cheap by the pound, and slightly dull on its own, hence the sauce. The costing of sixpence or eightpence a pound puts halibut squarely in the middle of the late-Victorian fish market, well below turbot and salmon, and the confident use of beef stock is a reminder that curry in this period was understood as a flavour applied to a British stew rather than as a separate cuisine with rules of its own. Ground rice as a thickener was common in fish cookery of the period.