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John Dory, Sauce For
When red mullet are plentiful, a good sauce for the John Dory may be made by boiling one, pounding the flesh, rubbing it through a hair sieve, and mixing it with half a pint of melted butter. Time, ten minutes to boil the mullet.
A one-line Victorian sauce that depends entirely on knowing what "melted butter" meant in a British kitchen of the 1880s. Read that point first.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Cassell's and its contemporaries, melted butter means the standard English butter sauce: a roux of about 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked briefly, loosened with water or fish stock to a pouring consistency, then finished with more butter. Plain liquid butter will simply separate and leave the pounded fish sitting on the plate in a pool.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups. That makes a generous quantity of sauce for a single fish.
- Hair sieveA fine drum sieve or tamis. A fine-mesh conical strainer with a ladle worked against it does the same job, and a food processor followed by a strainer is faster. The straining is not optional: red mullet has fine, hard bones that will not pound out.
- Ten minutes to boil the mulletThat suits a fish of a pound or more. A modern red mullet of 8-10 oz is done in four to five minutes in barely simmering salted water, and overcooking dries the flesh and dulls the flavour you are trying to extract.
- The liverRed mullet was traditionally valued for its liver, which is edible and intensely savoury, and the fish was often cooked undrawn on that account. If your fish comes with the liver, mash it into the sauce; if it has been cleaned at the counter, nothing is lost beyond depth.
- SubstitutesRed mullet is no longer cheap or plentiful in most markets. Gurnard, small snapper or any firm, sweet-fleshed non-oily white fish gives the same effect. Avoid oily fish, which turns the sauce muddy.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt, cayenne and a squeeze of lemon are usual in Victorian fish sauces, and the pounded fish needs all three to keep it from tasting flat.
- ConsistencyAdd the sieved fish to the finished butter sauce off the heat and warm it through without boiling. Held at a boil, the purée tightens and the sauce turns grainy.
John Dory (Zeus faber) is the flat, ugly, wonderfully firm-fleshed fish whose dark thumbprint-shaped spot gave rise to the tradition that Saint Peter marked it when he took the tribute coin from its mouth — hence its other name, Saint Peter's fish, and the guess, generally offered rather than documented, that "Dory" comes from the French dor\like turbot, it was served plainly boiled with a sauce doing the work. Enriching one fish with the pounded flesh of another belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century fish sauces built on lobster, shrimp or crayfish butters, and this version records a moment when red mullet could be treated, when plentiful, as a flavouring. It reads very differently now that mullet costs more than the Dory.