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Plaice, with Mushrooms
Take a plaice weighing about two pounds, trim it, dry it, and cut it into slices an inch wide. Make a pint of fish stock from the cuttings, and strain it into a clean pan. Wash and break up half a pound of mushrooms, fry them a little in a bit of butter, then add them to the stock with a table-spoonful of browned flour. Put the fish in, season to taste, and simmer for twenty minutes or so. Pile it on a dish, and pour the gravy over. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
A plain fish stew from the days when plaice was cheap and a fishmonger would hand over the head and frame for stock. Two adjustments make it work: shorten the simmer drastically, and understand what browned flour is.
- The twenty-minute simmerPlaice is a thin, delicate flatfish; twenty minutes in liquid reduces it to cotton wool. Poach the pieces in the finished sauce for 5 to 8 minutes, until the flesh just parts from the bone, then lift them out with a slotted spoon.
- Browned flourFlour toasted in a dry pan over low heat, stirred constantly, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of weak tea. It thickens less than raw flour but gives the gravy its colour and a roasted flavour. Slake the tablespoon with a little cold stock before adding it, or it will lump.
- A 2 lb plaiceThat is one good-sized whole fish, unfilleted, which is how the recipe intends it: cut across the fish into inch-wide sections, bone and all. Fillets work if that is what you can get, but cut them into wide strips and add them at the very end, giving them 3 to 4 minutes.
- Fish stock in twenty minutesThe head, frame and trimmings with an onion, a bay leaf and a pint of water. Fish bones give up their flavour quickly and long boiling is generally held to turn the stock bitter, so twenty to thirty minutes is enough; strain it early. Do not let it boil hard or the stock clouds.
- "Wash and break up" the mushroomsField or chestnut mushrooms, most likely torn rather than sliced, so they hold their shape in the liquid. Rinse only if gritty, and dry them, or they will steam instead of frying.
- Season to tasteThe original assumes salt, pepper and probably a squeeze of lemon or a dash of anchovy essence. Season the sauce before the fish goes in, since the fish will not take much seasoning in five minutes.
- YieldServes three, perhaps four with potatoes. Pile the fish in the centre of a warmed dish and spoon the mushroom gravy over rather than pouring it, which would break the pieces up.
- Probable cost, 1s. 4d.Cassell's costed nearly every dish for a housekeeper working to a weekly budget. One shilling and fourpence is sixteen pence, a modest sum for a dish of this size.
Plaice was the workhorse flatfish of the Victorian British table: landed in quantity on the North Sea coasts, sold cheap, and generally regarded as a poor relation to sole and turbot, which is why cookery books gave it sauces and garnishes to lift it. The treatment here, with mushrooms and a browned-flour gravy, resembles the older ragout method, in which fish was cut up and stewed in a thickened stock much as meat would be. Making the stock from the trimmings of the same fish is not a flourish but the ordinary economy of the period, when nothing that could give flavour was thrown out; Cassell's habit of printing a probable cost beside each recipe belongs to the same instinct.