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TURBOT (a la Creme d'Anchois)
Boil a moderate-sized turbot in the usual way, and place it carefully on a hot dish without a napkin. Flavour a pint of rich melted butter with one or two tea-spoonfuls of essence of anchovies, and add one-eighth of a pint of thick cream. Mix the sauce over the fire, and when it is nearly boiling pour it over the fish.
Sprinkle a table-spoonful of chopped capers or gherkins upon the surface, garnish the dish with a border of new potatoes, and serve very hot. Time, a few minutes to heat the sauce. This quantity of sauce is sufficient for a moderate-sized fish.
A Victorian dressed-fish dish that stands or falls on the sauce. Everything here is straightforward once two English terms are decoded: "melted butter" and "essence of anchovies".
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery this means the standard butter sauce: butter and flour cooked to a pale roux and whisked smooth with water or stock, the proportions varying from book to book but commonly in the region of an ounce of each per half pint of liquid. A pint of plain molten butter poured over a turbot would be inedible.
- The measuresCassell's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, so the sauce base is 2.5 cups. One-eighth of a pint is 2.5 fl oz, a scant third of a cup of cream. A tablespoon of capers or gherkins is the English tablespoon, close enough to the modern one.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin bottled anchovy extract, still sold in Britain and often labelled anchovy essence. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water works, at roughly half a teaspoon of paste per teaspoon of essence; colatura di alici is closer in texture. Add it off the boil and taste, since brands vary sharply in salt.
- Do not let the sauce boil once the cream is inThe instruction says "nearly boiling" and means it. An anchovy-salted, flour-thickened sauce with cream added at the end may thin or turn grainy if it is brought to a rolling boil.
- Boiling the fish "in the usual way"Turbot was poached, not boiled hard: salted water with a splash of milk or lemon juice to keep the flesh white, brought barely to a shiver and held there, roughly 8 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest part. It is done when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- Sourcing the fishWild turbot is expensive and often unavailable outside Europe. Brill, halibut or a thick piece of farmed turbot behave the same way under the sauce; whatever you use, keep it a single thick flat piece so it heats evenly.
- "Without a napkin"Boiled fish was normally sent to table on a folded damask napkin to absorb the draining water. Here the fish goes onto the bare hot dish so the sauce can pool around it rather than soak into linen. Warm the platter thoroughly.
- YieldThe book says only "moderate-sized"; that might put the fish somewhere in the 4 to 6 lb range, serving six or so, but no weight is given. The stated pint of sauce is generous by modern taste; half that quantity suits most tables.
Turbot was the grand fish of the Victorian dinner table, the one that justified owning a diamond-shaped turbot kettle, and it was most often sent up plain-boiled so that the sauce could do the work. Anchovy was one of its familiar partners in English kitchens, often as bottled essence, a commercial convenience of the same family as the mushroom ketchups and Worcestershire-style sauces that filled the store cupboard by the 1870s, though lobster and shrimp sauces were at least as usual; the cream and the scattering of capers or gherkins are a French gloss on that very English pairing, which is what the affected title \ crème d'anchois is signalling. Cassell's, compiled as a household dictionary rather than a chef's manual, tends to assume the reader already knows how to boil a turbot and how to make melted butter, and spends its words instead on the finish and the garnish, here a border of new potatoes that suggests early summer.