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Mullet, Red
These fish may be roast, baked, or broiled, and are excellent either way. Scrape and wash, then wipe them quickly. The gills and fins only are removed, but the inside is dressed with the fish, the liver being a much-esteemed morsel. Fold each mullet in oiled or buttered paper, and bake about twenty-five minutes. Serve without the paper, and with sauce in a tureen. Make the sauce thus. Into a little good melted butter pour the liquor which has oozed from the fish, add a glassful of wine, white or red, a little essence of anchovies, cayenne, and lemon-juice. Time, twenty to thirty minutes to prepare. Probable cost, from 1s. to 2s. each.
A plain instruction for red mullet baked in paper, with a butter-and-anchovy sauce built from the juices. Two things need translating: the paper parcel and what a Victorian cook meant by "melted butter".
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book assumes a coal range and leaves the judgement to the cook. A moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, answers for the twenty-five minutes specified, which suits a fish of around 8-10 oz; smaller mullet will need appreciably less - test whether the flesh parts from the backbone.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery this means a thickened butter sauce - roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of water or light stock - not simply butter liquefied in a pan. Melted butter alone will split when you add the wine and lemon juice.
- The paper parcelBaking parchment, well buttered, does the job of the original oiled paper; foil works but gives a slightly steamed result. Fold and crimp the edges so no liquor escapes, since that liquor is the base of the sauce. Open the parcel over a bowl, not the sink.
- Left undrawnOnly gills and fins come off; the fish is cooked with its insides, the liver being the prize. If that is not to your taste, gut the fish and set the liver back inside the cavity before wrapping. Scale it properly - red mullet scales are large and loose and will end up in the sauce otherwise.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin commercial anchovy extract, once sold in every grocer's. Use about a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two or three fillets mashed to a purée; add it off the boil and taste before adding more, since modern pastes are saltier.
- The glass of wineA wine glass of the period is roughly 2 fl oz. Reduce it briefly in the pan before it goes into the butter sauce, or the sauce tastes raw and acidic.
- Yield and costOne mullet per person, served whole with the sauce passed separately in a tureen, as the recipe directs. The "1s. to 2s. each" is the book's own estimate of the market price and indicates a fish at the expensive end, not a cheap one.
Red mullet (Mullus surmuletus in northern waters, its Mediterranean cousin Mullus barbatus) had a reputation out of proportion to its size. The Romans prized mullus to the point of absurdity, and Victorian cookery books inherited the enthusiasm, sometimes calling the fish the "woodcock of the sea" because, like the bird, it was traditionally dressed and cooked with the trail left in and the liver eaten as the best part. Cooking in an oiled paper case - what French cookery calls en papillote - was one treatment among several in English kitchens, alongside roasting, baking and broiling, and it was favoured precisely because it kept every drop of the fish's juice, which then became the sauce; Cassell's assumption that the reader knows how to make "melted butter" without being told is a good measure of how basic that flour-and-butter sauce was to the period's cooking.