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John Dory, Cold, to Warm Up
This fish when warmed up is apt to taste a little strong, therefore the best way of serving it a second time is as a salad, or in a mayonnaise. If this is not liked, remove the flesh from the bones, and divide it into rather large pieces. Put these into a saucepan, season with salt and cayenne, and pour over them any remains of the sauce with which it was served when cold, and heat it gradually for a few minutes, but do not let it boil. Lift it out gently, so as not to break the fish, and serve on a hot dish. If there is no cold sauce, a little melted butter, flavoured with two or three drops of essence of anchovies, may be used instead. Sufficient, if made with a pound of fish, for two persons.
A rechauffé from the era when a large fish was expected to appear at two meals. The technique is sound; only the shopping and the safety margins need updating.
- Never boil itThe whole point of the method is a bare simmer at most — the flesh is already cooked, and boiling shreds it and drives out the moisture. Keep the pan below a shiver, and move the fish with a fish slice or two spoons rather than stirring.
- Reheat properly all the same"A few minutes" over gentle heat suits a fish taken from a cold larder that day. Cooked fish kept in the refrigerator should be brought to steaming hot throughout, around 165F/74C at the centre, and eaten within two days of the first cooking.
- John Dory itselfZeus faber is common in European markets and rarely seen in American ones. Any firm, mild white fish that holds together in large flakes — turbot, brill, halibut, monkfish, black sea bass — behaves the same way reheated.
- "Melted butter"In Victorian usage this is not clarified or plain melted butter but the standard English butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together and loosened with water or fish stock, finished with more butter. Proportions varied from book to book.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin bottled anchovy extract, close in effect to modern anchovy paste thinned with a little water; Worcestershire sauce is a rougher stand-in. Two or three drops was a seasoning, not a flavour in its own right; start smaller than instinct suggests.
- The strong tasteThe warning is real. Cooked fish develops noticeably stale flavours after a day or so, which is why the book steers you first toward a cold salad or mayonnaise, where an acid dressing masks it. If the fish smells at all assertive when cold, use it cold and dressed.
- YieldThe recipe gives a pound of fish as sufficient for two, without saying whether that pound is weighed before or after the bones and skin come out.
John Dory is awkward to buy in small quantity because the head and bony frame account for so much of its weight — precisely the sort of purchase that guaranteed leftovers, which is why the book gives it a warming-up entry at all. The name has been derived in more than one way: a common suggestion is the French doré, gilded, after the fish's yellowish sheen; another attaches it to a character called John Dory in an English ballad. Neither is settled. The dark round spot on its flank has long been called St Peter's thumbprint, and in several languages the fish is simply St Peter's fish. Entries like this one belong to the large nineteenth-century literature of réchauffés — the systematic reuse of cooked meat and fish, treated in the household manuals as a matter of skill and thrift rather than apology.