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RED MULLET (en Papillote)
Take out the gills; wash the fish, wipe carefully, and flour it. Take a piece of letter-paper, cut it in the shape of a heart, and oil it. Season with pepper and salt, lay the mullet on one side, and season this also. Fold the paper over, and turn over the edges securely. Broil the fish on a gentle fire until it is lightly browned on both sides without the paper being at all burnt, and serve it in the paper on a hot dish. It will be excellent without sauce, but if this is required, melted butter, anchovy sauce, Dutch sauce, or Italian sauce may be sent to table with it. Sometimes a little good sauce made as for baked mullet (see the preceding recipe) is spread over the fish inside the paper. Mullet en papillote may be baked as well as broiled. A little sauce may then be made with the liquor which comes from them, mixed with a glassful of wine, a dessert-spoonful of anchovy, and a tea-spoonful of soy, thickened with a little flour, and stirred over the fire till smooth. Time to broil, twenty to thirty minutes.
A Victorian rendering of the classic French en papillote, written for an open grate rather than an oven. Two things need translating: the paper and the cooking time.
- The paperOiled letter-paper over a live fire is the one instruction not to reproduce literally; ordinary writing paper scorches and can catch. Use baking parchment cut to the same heart shape, brushed with oil, and fold the edges over in overlapping pleats to seal.
- Broiling means an open fireThe original sets the parcel over a gentle fire and browns it on both sides, so it must be turned. A workable modern equivalent is the oven route the recipe itself allows: around 400F, on a baking sheet, no turning.
- TimeTwenty to thirty minutes suits a fire whose heat has to work through paper. A whole red mullet of 8-10 oz needs about 12-15 minutes at 400F; the parcel will balloon and the flesh should come away from the backbone cleanly.
- Cleaning the fishOnly the gills are removed here, and that is deliberate. Red mullet is traditionally cooked ungutted so the liver can be eaten with the flesh; if that does not appeal, gut it, but do so before flouring.
- Sauces namedDutch sauce is hollandaise. Italian sauce is a reduction of shallots, mushrooms and herbs in stock and wine. "Anchovy" in the pan sauce means anchovy essence or paste, not whole fillets, and "soy" is soy sauce, then sold as a bottled condiment for made sauces.
- Small measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. A glassful of wine in Victorian cookery conventionally means a wineglass, roughly 2 fluid ounces or a quarter cup, not a modern pour.
- ServingOne fish per person. Bring the parcels to the table closed and let each person open their own; the aroma trapped in the paper is the whole point, and the sauces are offered separately.
En papillote - literally "in a paper wrapper" - was standard French kitchen practice long before it reached English household manuals, and the red mullet is its archetypal subject. Mullus surmuletus was prized by the Romans, who are said to have paid extravagantly for large specimens, and it kept an aristocratic reputation in European kitchens; it is often called the woodcock of the sea because, like that bird, it is cooked and eaten with its liver in place. The recipe sits in a run of mullet dishes - it refers back to the preceding baked mullet - and the fish is lean and delicate and dries out quickly over direct heat, which is exactly the problem the paper case solves: it traps steam and the fish's own juices so that nothing escapes onto the coals. The alternative sauce at the end, built on the liquor in the paper with wine, anchovy and soy, is very much of its period - bottled soy and anchovy essence were staple English store-cupboard flavourings through the nineteenth century, used the way a cook now reaches for fish sauce.