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MULLET, RED (aux Fines Herbes)
Put two mullets into a stewpan with one ounce of butter, a table-spoonful of Harvey's sauce, the same of essence of anchovies, and a glass of white wine. Stew them over a slow fire until tender. Place them on a hot dish in the oven. Add to the liquor in which the fish was cooked a tea-spoonful of chopped mushrooms, a tea-spoonful of chopped shallot, a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, a lump of sugar, and a grating of nutmeg. Stir the sauce over the fire for ten minutes. Pour it over the fish, and serve very hot.
A quick brown-sauce braise for whole red mullet, written for cooks who had bottled Harvey's sauce and essence of anchovies on the shelf. Both are worth sorting out before you start, and the title promises herbs the method never delivers.
- The title's missing herbsNothing in the instructions is a fine herb — the mushroom and shallot are as close as it gets. If you want the dish to match its name, stir a tablespoon of chopped parsley, chervil and tarragon into the sauce off the heat at the very end.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial spiced anchovy-and-soy condiment, once as common as ketchup and no longer made. Worcestershire sauce is its nearest surviving relative and can be used measure for measure.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin salty anchovy extract, not the modern paste. Use about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste loosened with a little water, or a tablespoon of Italian colatura di alici. Add no salt until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- Fish and yieldTwo red mullet of 8-12 oz each serve two. Scale them and take the gills, but the fish is traditionally cooked ungutted or with the liver left in, which is where much of its flavour sits — say so at the fishmonger. Small snapper or sea bream will stand in.
- "Slow fire" and the real timingA bare simmer, lid on, and 8-10 minutes for fish this size — the flesh should just come away from the backbone. "Stew until tender" invites overcooking; mullet turns cottony well before it turns tender in the way a stewing meat does.
- Holding in the ovenThis is a warming step only. 200F, loosely covered, for the ten minutes the sauce takes. Any hotter and the fish carries on cooking.
- QuantitiesA "glass" of wine in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though usage varied and some writers clearly meant more; a lump of sugar is roughly a teaspoon. The finished sauce is small in volume by design — expect a couple of spoonfuls each, glossy and dark, not a pool.
- Finishing the sauceTen minutes of stirring over the fire will reduce it, so keep it at a lively simmer and pull it when it coats a spoon. A knob of cold butter whisked in at the end will give it a gloss.
Red mullet has been the aristocrat of Mediterranean fish since antiquity — Roman writers record absurd prices paid for large specimens — and in nineteenth-century Britain it was known as the "woodcock of the sea" because, like the bird, it was cooked and eaten undrawn, the liver counted as the best part. Its arrival in an English dictionary of cookery under a French name reflects the reach of restaurant cooking into the Victorian household kitchen, and the sauce is a thoroughly British compromise: bottled Harvey's sauce and essence of anchovies, two staples of the mid-century larder, standing in for the reduced stock a professional kitchen would have had to hand. Harvey's, a proprietary spiced anchovy sauce sold in London from the late eighteenth century onward, appears throughout Cassell's as shorthand for savoury depth, much as Worcestershire does in recipes today.