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RED MULLET, BAKED (another way)
Butter a metal pie-dish, lay the fish in it, pour over them about a wine-glassful of flour and water or good broth, lay pieces of butter on them, and baste all the time they are cooking. The gravy which comes from them is red; the colour may be heightened by a tea-spoonful of essence of shrimps or anchovy, but should not be discoloured by ketchup, Reading, or other black-brown sauce. Serve the fish in the dish in which they were baked.
A spare set of directions that assumes you know how hot the oven is and how long a small fish takes. The essential instruction is the negative one: nothing dark goes near the sauce, because the whole point is the rosy liquor the fish gives up.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, 350–375F, suits red mullet; 8–12 oz fish take roughly 15–20 minutes, larger ones up to 25. They are done when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- A wine-glassfulVictorian wine glasses were small: reckon about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup. It is enough to keep the dish from scorching, not enough to poach the fish.
- "Flour and water"This means a thin slurry — a level teaspoon of flour whisked smooth into the liquid — so the pan juices thicken very slightly as they cook. The quantity is genuinely vague in the original; err on the side of less flour.
- Metal pie-dishA shallow enamelled or tinned dish that goes from oven to table. Any small gratin dish or metal roasting tin works, since the fish is served in it.
- Essence of shrimps or anchovyBoth were bottled savoury essences. Anchovy essence is still sold; failing that, a teaspoon of good fish sauce or a crushed salted anchovy melted into the butter does the same work. Half a teaspoon is plenty for two fish.
- Reading sauceA proprietary dark brown condiment of the period, walnut- and anchovy-based, in the Worcestershire family. The warning stands: any brown sauce or mushroom ketchup will turn the pink gravy a muddy grey.
- Don't clean it outRed mullet is traditionally cooked ungutted, or with only the gills and gut removed and the liver left in, the liver being considered the best of it. Ask the fishmonger to scale rather than dress the fish. The recipe itself says nothing about gutting, though the liver is often credited with adding depth to the gravy.
- BastingTaken literally, this means opening the oven every few minutes over a 15-minute bake. Two or three bastings are enough; the butter and the shallow liquid do the rest.
- YieldOne fish of 8–10 oz per person, with bread or plain boiled potatoes to take up the juices.
Red mullet (Mullus surmuletus) has carried an outsized reputation since antiquity — Roman writers record extravagant prices paid for large specimens, and the fish's habit of changing colour as it died was part of the spectacle. English cooks of the nineteenth century inherited that prestige and treated the fish with deliberate restraint: it is often called the woodcock of the sea, because like the woodcock it was cooked and eaten with its trail intact rather than drawn. That explains the insistence here on protecting the colour and flavour of the gravy. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households with a servant or two, could assume access to bottled essences of shrimp and anchovy and to proprietary brown sauces such as the one made at Reading; half the instruction in this entry is about which of those bottles to leave on the shelf.