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TURBOT (a la Provencale)
Take all skin and bone from some cooked turbot, and flake it. Grease a dish, and put in enough chives, parsley, and shallots, all chopped, to cover the bottom. Season with salt, grated lemon-peel, nutmeg, and a little pepper and cayenne, then pour enough salad-oil over to moisten these ingredients. Spread the fish, moistened with a little milk, on the top in a layer of an inch or more. Then put more seasoning on the top, with more oil or bits of butter. Bake for a quarter of an hour or so, closely covered at first, but uncovered during the latter part of the time. Serve very hot.
A leftover-fish dish dressed up with oil and herbs. The original assumes you have poached turbot sitting in the larder and gives no oven temperature, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350-375F. The fish is already cooked, so the bake is only to heat through and marry the oil with the herbs.
- Salad-oilIn a Victorian British kitchen this most often meant olive oil, though other oils were sold under the same name. Given the Provencal framing, a decent everyday olive oil is right; a peppery estate oil will fight the nutmeg.
- Turbot and its substitutesWild turbot is now costly and often quota-limited. Farmed turbot, brill, halibut or any firm white flatfish flakes the same way. Avoid thin, watery fillets, which collapse into paste rather than flakes.
- Cooked turbotThe recipe presumes leftovers from a poached or boiled fish. Starting from raw, poach the fish first and cool it before flaking, or the layer will shed liquid into the oil and the dish will sit in a puddle.
- The layer thicknessAn inch or more of packed flakes is the point of the dish. Spread thinner and the herbs and oil overwhelm the fish; the milk is there only to keep it from drying, not to make a sauce.
- Covered, then uncoveredFoil or a lid for the first eight to ten minutes steams the fish through, then the last five minutes uncovered lets the top dry and colour a little. Skipping the covered stage gives you hot edges and a cool centre.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is right for already-cooked fish in a shallow dish. Longer and reheated flakes turn cottony, whatever the oil is doing.
- Grated lemon-peelZest only, no white pith, and add it with the other seasonings rather than at the end; it needs the warm oil to release.
- YieldAbout a pound of cooked flaked fish fills a shallow dish and serves three or four as a light main course, more as a first course.
A la Provencale in nineteenth-century British cookery books was a shorthand for oil, garlic or shallot, and chopped green herbs, in contrast to the flour-and-butter sauces that dominated the rest of the fish chapter. Turbot was the grand fish of the British dinner table, boiled whole and served on a napkin with lobster or shrimp sauce, and a dish of this kind may well have been a way of using up what was left of it. The flaking, layering and brief covered bake are the same moves that produce a fish pie or a gratin, minus the sauce and the crumbs. The nutmeg and cayenne alongside the lemon-peel are thoroughly English rather than southern French, a reminder of how loosely regional labels were applied in the period's kitchen literature.