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Red Mullet, Filleted and Fried
Take half a dozen red mullet, scrape them lightly, cut off their heads, cut the fish open, take out the inside, and carefully preserve the liver. Divide the fish in halves, and lift the flesh from the bones, so that each mullet will make two fillets. Dry and flour these, and dip them either into egg and seasoned bread-crumbs, or into a little frying-batter. Fry in hot fat, and when they are lightly browned on both sides serve on a hot dish, and send a sauce prepared as follows to table with them. Beat the boiled livers of the fish with the back of a wooden spoon till they are smooth. Drop them into a saucepan containing the third of a pint of thin melted butter made with water in which the livers have been boiled for five or six minutes. Stir the sauce over the fire till it is thick, season with pepper and salt, and just before serving add to it a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, and half a glassful of claret, if liked. Time to fry, ten minutes or more.
A straightforward fry, with a sauce built on the one part of the fish most cooks now discard. The instructions assume you can buy red mullet whole and unscaled, and that "melted butter" means a thickened sauce rather than butter in a pan.
- The livers are the pointEverything hinges on saving them. Red mullet liver is rich and faintly bitter, and the sauce is flat without it. Ask the fishmonger to leave the fish whole and ungutted, or gut them yourself and set the livers aside in a small bowl as you work.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not liquid butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a butter sauce thickened with flour, roughly a tablespoon of flour and 2 oz butter cooked together and let down with liquid. Here the liquid is the water the livers were poached in. Modern shorthand: make a small blond roux, whisk in the liver water, then the mashed livers.
- A third of a pintAn imperial third-pint is a little under 7 fl oz, so about 3/4 cup of finished sauce. That is enough for twelve fillets served as a first course.
- Spoon and glass measuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. "Half a glassful" of claret is vague; a Victorian wine-glassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so treat this as roughly 1 fl oz of dry red wine, stirred in at the last moment as the recipe directs.
- Frying timeTen minutes suits whole or thickly battered fish. Boneless mullet fillets are thin, and crumbed they need roughly two minutes a side in fat at 350-375F. Judge by the crumb colour, not the clock.
- Scraping lightlyRed mullet scales are large and loose and come away easily, but the skin beneath tears. Work from tail to head with the back of a knife under running water, and handle the fillets gently once skinned of scales.
- Pin bonesLifting the flesh from the bones leaves a row of fine pin bones along the fillet. Run a finger down the centre line and pull them with tweezers before flouring.
- If you cannot get red mulletSmall snapper or gurnard fillets fry the same way, though neither gives you the liver. In that case a plain butter sauce sharpened with lemon is the honest substitute rather than a pretence at the original.
- YieldSix mullet give twelve fillets, serving four as a main course or six as a first course.
Red mullet held a peculiar prestige in European cooking long before Cassell's, and the fish's reputation rests partly on the Romans, who paid absurd prices for large mullus and are said to have kept them alive at table to watch the colours change as they died. The English habit of cooking mullet ungutted, or of saving the liver as here, earned it the nickname "the woodcock of the sea", by analogy with the game bird traditionally roasted with its trail intact. The recipe does two things at once: it fillets a small round fish, and it makes a compound sauce from what would otherwise be waste. That thrift is characteristic of the book, and a sauce built on six small livers and the water they poached in would have counted as good economy rather than gastronomic daring.