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John Dory, Boiled
Empty and cleanse the fish thoroughly, cut off the fins, and rub a little salt over the outside. Put it into a fish-kettle, with cold water enough to cover it, and an ounce of salt to each quart of water. Heat it very gradually, and be careful that it boils slowly. Serve on a hot napkin, and garnish with curled parsley and cut lemon. Shrimp, anchovy, lobster, or Dutch sauce should be sent to table with the fish. Time to boil, according to the size; a fish weighing five pounds will require about a quarter of an hour's gentle boiling. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain salt-water poach of a whole flatfish-shaped, thin-bodied fish. Almost everything worth saying is about heat control and about the fish itself, which reaches modern fishmongers in a different form than it did Victorian ones.
- Never actually boil itThe hinge of the recipe is in the words "very gradually" and "slowly." John Dory is a lean, fine-flaked fish that shreds and dries at a rolling boil. Bring the water to about 170–180F and hold it there, with barely a tremble on the surface.
- The salt ratioAn ounce of salt to each quart of water is roughly 2 tablespoons of fine salt per litre, a brine of about 3 per cent. This is not seasoning so much as it is preventing the flesh from leaching into the water, and it is worth keeping.
- No fish kettleA fish kettle is a long lidded pan with a perforated lifting trivet. A deep roasting tin covered with foil works, or a wide sauté pan for a smaller fish; lay the fish on a doubled strip of muslin or baking parchment so you can lift it out without breaking it.
- TimingA quarter of an hour for five pounds is about right because a John Dory is very thin for its weight — most of that five pounds is head and the great spiny dorsal. Judge by thickness rather than weight: roughly 8–10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, and check that the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- Buying one wholeJohn Dory (Zeus faber) is now usually sold as fillets, and whole fish of five pounds are uncommon; two smaller fish of 1.5-2 lb each are the likelier find and want only 8-10 minutes, though between them they will not stretch quite as far as a five-pounder. Expect a low yield from the whole fish -- the head is enormous relative to the body.
- Dutch sauce"Dutch sauce" in Cassell's is the butter-and-egg-yolk sauce sharpened with lemon or vinegar that we would now call hollandaise. Anchovy sauce is a butter sauce with anchovy essence; shrimp and lobster sauces are the same base with the shellfish worked in.
- The hot napkinA folded linen cloth on the platter absorbs the poaching water that drains from the fish, so the sauce is not thinned at table. A warmed plate lined with a clean tea towel does the same job.
- YieldFive or six as a course in a Victorian dinner of many courses. As a main dish with vegetables, a five-pound whole dory feeds three or four.
John Dory has been prized on the south-west English coast for centuries, and the name has attracted more etymology than it can support: it is variously traced to the French jaune dorée, "golden yellow," and to the sixteenth-century ballad of the pirate John Dory, though neither derivation is settled. The dark thumbprint spot on each flank gives it its other common names across Europe — St Peter's fish, saint-pierre, pesce San Pietro — from the tradition that the apostle grasped the fish when taking the tribute coin from its mouth. Georgian and Victorian gourmets ranked it very high; the actor James Quin is often said to have been devoted to it, and Cassell's placing of the fish here, with four rich sauces offered alongside a bare salt poach, shows the period's confidence that a first-rate fish needed no cookery at all beyond careful water. The note "probable cost, uncertain" is candid: the dory was landed in small numbers and its price at market swung wildly, which is much the same situation today.