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Red Mullet, Fried
Melt two ounces of butter in a frying-pan. Put in one good-sized or two small mullet, squeeze the juice of half a lemon over them, and season with pepper and salt. Let them fry over a gentle fire until they are done enough, turning them over when half done that they may be equally cooked. Serve on a hot dish, either plain or with melted butter, Dutch sauce, or anchovy sauce. Time to fry the fish, a few minutes.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know your fish. Almost everything worth saying is about the fish itself and about the sauces named at the end.
- The fish is not grey mulletRed mullet is Mullus surmuletus or M. barbatus, a small red-skinned goatfish with barbels, unrelated to the grey or striped mullet sold under a similar name. If you cannot get it, small red snapper or a whole sea bream fillet behaves similarly under butter.
- Traditionally cooked unguttedVictorian cookery writing commonly has red mullet cooked whole with the liver, and often the gut, left in, which is the usual explanation offered for the "woodcock of the sea" nickname. The recipe says nothing either way about cleaning. Scale it, trim the fins, and gut it if you prefer; the liver is worth keeping either way.
- Gentle fire, and whyTwo ounces of butter over a brisk heat will brown and then burn before a whole fish is cooked through. Keep the pan at a steady medium and baste; clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, buys more margin.
- "Done enough"A 6-8 oz whole mullet needs roughly three to four minutes a side. The flesh at the thickest point behind the head should be opaque and lift cleanly from the backbone; 145F at the spine is the modern marker.
- Melted butterIn a book of this date "melted butter" is not simply butter melted but the standard English butter sauce, butter worked into a little flour and water or fish stock until it thickens. Plain melted butter with the pan juices and lemon is a fair substitute.
- Dutch sauceDutch sauce is the period name for hollandaise: egg yolks, butter, and lemon or vinegar. Anchovy sauce is the same butter sauce base with anchovy essence stirred through.
- YieldAs written this serves one, or two at a stretch. Scale up by the fish rather than the butter, and fry in batches so the pan is not crowded and steaming.
Red mullet was one of the most prized fish on the Victorian table, and the price reflected it; the Romans had made a cult of the fish centuries earlier, prizing the way its skin flushed scarlet as it died. The English habit of cooking it whole and undrawn, so that the liver flavours the flesh, earned it the name "woodcock of the sea" "woodcock being likewise roasted with its trail intact. Cassell's gives a plain treatment: butter, lemon, pepper and salt, with the interest deferred to whichever of the three standard sauces the cook chooses. That structure "a bare cooking method followed by a short menu of sauces" is typical of the dictionary format, with melted butter, Dutch sauce and anchovy sauce each treated elsewhere in the same volume.