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PLAICE (a la Duchesse)
Boil a good-sized plaice in three parts water and one of white wine or white vinegar, with two bay-leaves, the rind of a lemon, and salt to taste. Cook for fifteen or twenty minutes, according to size. Take out the fish and keep it hot. Strain the liquor, return it to the saucepan with an ounce of butter rolled in flour, the grated rind of a lemon, and three ounces of mixed capers; stir the sauce over a slow fire until it thickens, and pour it over the fish. If vinegar is used, only half the quantity of lemon rind will be required.
A plain court-bouillon poach finished with a caper and lemon butter sauce. The one thing to change is the cooking time: twenty minutes will reduce plaice to cotton wool.
- TimingPlaice is a thin, delicate flatfish. A whole one of about 1-1.5 lb needs 8-10 minutes at a bare shiver, fillets 4-6 minutes; it is done when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone. The fifteen to twenty minutes given here assumes a rolling pan and a cook who wants the fish unmistakably cooked through.
- The poaching liquorThree parts water to one of white wine gives a noticeable amount of acid, and with vinegar it is sharper still. Use enough to just cover the fish in a wide pan or roasting tin, and keep it below a simmer -- hard boiling breaks the flesh apart before it is cooked.
- "Butter rolled in flour"This is beurre mani : work 1 oz softened butter with roughly the same weight of flour into a paste, then whisk it into the hot liquor in small pieces. Added as a lump it will sit on the surface and go lumpy.
- Reduce firstThe strained liquor will be thin and very acidic straight from the pan. Boil it down by half to two-thirds before thickening, or the sauce will taste of nothing but wine and lemon.
- CapersThree ounces is a large amount by modern taste -- closer to a small jarful. Capers in brine should be drained and rinsed; salt-packed ones need soaking, or the sauce will need no salt at all and may still be too salty.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith turns the sauce bitter over a long reduction. The note about halving the rind when vinegar is used is sound -- vinegar already supplies the acidity that wine plus lemon would otherwise share.
- "A slow fire"Low heat, just enough to keep the sauce moving. Once thickened it should not boil hard, or the butter will separate out.
- YieldA good-sized plaice serves two, or three modestly. Boiled or steamed potatoes are the usual accompaniment, and given the name of the dish, piped duchesse potatoes would not be out of place.
In late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery la duchesse was an elastic label, most often signalling duchesse potatoes -- mashed potato enriched with egg yolk and piped or moulded -- but it was also attached loosely to any dish given a little extra richness or dressing up. Cookery dictionaries of the period, arranged alphabetically like reference works rather than narrative cookbooks, gather dozens of such variations under each fish, and plaice tends to be well represented, being cheap and abundant in the North Sea. The method itself is older than the French name: poaching white fish in an acidulated liquor and serving it under a flour-thickened caper sauce is the same logic that produced boiled mutton with caper sauce, the capers being the imported article for which earlier English kitchens had substituted pickled nasturtium buds and samphire to cut through plain boiled food.