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John Dory, Baked
Clean, dry, and flour a small fish, season it with pepper and salt, and sprinkle a little finely-minced parsley over it. Brush it well with clarified butter, and place it in a well-buttered baking-dish. Pour a glass of light wine over it, and bake in a moderate oven. For sauce, beat the yolks of two eggs, put them into a saucepan with two ounces of butter, the strained juice of half a fresh lemon, two table-spoonfuls of cold water, half a salt-spoonful of salt, a grain of cayenne, and a small pinch of powdered mace. Stir well until the sauce nearly boils. If the boiling point is reached the sauce will curdle. Send it to table poured over the fish, and garnish with cut lemon and parsley. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A whole baked flatfish with what is essentially a loose hollandaise made directly in the pan. The sauce is the only difficult part, and the recipe tells you plainly why.
- The hinge: keep the sauce below a simmerTwo yolks with two ounces of butter and only two tablespoons of water is a thin margin. Work over low heat or in a bowl set over barely steaming water, stir constantly, and pull it off the moment it thickens and coats the spoon. If it reaches a boil the yolks scramble, and a curdled sauce is difficult to bring back.
- "A moderate oven"About 350F, moderate ovens of the period covering roughly 325-375F. Twenty minutes suits a John Dory of about 1 to 1.5 lb; test at the thickest part behind the head, where the flesh should come away from the bone cleanly.
- "A glass of light wine"Roughly a wine glass of the period, about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup). A dry white — anything you would drink with the fish. It becomes the pan liquor, so it is worth spooning over the fish before the sauce goes on.
- Salt-spoonful and "a grain" of cayenneA salt-spoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half of one is a scant 1/8 teaspoon. A grain of cayenne means the smallest pinch you can pick up; the heat should not be identifiable.
- Powdered maceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground in small jars and worth buying rather than substituting. Freshly grated nutmeg is the nearest thing if you have none.
- Finding the fishJohn Dory is a European fish, common in British and Mediterranean markets and scarce in North America. A whole gurnard, small turbot, black sea bass or two thick sole fillets will all take this treatment; adjust the baking time to thickness rather than weight.
- Butter for brushingClarified butter is specified, presumably because the milk solids would scorch during the bake. Clarify a stick and keep the surplus; ordinary melted butter will work but browns the skin faster.
- YieldTwo to three as the book says, which assumes a fish of a pound or more and other courses. Treated as a main course with vegetables it feeds two.
John Dory — Zeus faber — was long a fishmonger's fish rather than a fashionable one, prized in the West Country and around the Mediterranean for firm white flesh and famously ugly on the slab, with an enormous hinged mouth and a dark thumbprint spot on each flank. The name's origin is disputed; it is often traced to the French jaune dorée, "golden yellow," though an older tradition attaches it to a ballad character, and the spot is popularly called St Peter's thumbmark. The entry declines to give a price at all, recording the cost simply as "uncertain." The sauce is a plain nineteenth-century Dutch or Dutch-style butter sauce, the same family as hollandaise, made in a saucepan over direct heat.