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Turbot, Boiled
Empty the fish, wash it inside with scrupulous nicety, then remove the scales and gills, and trim the fins, but do not cut them off, as the gelatinous parts about them are esteemed a great delicacy. Rub a little salt all over the outside of the fish--this will make the slime come off more easily, and do away with the necessity for soaking the fish. Wash it until it is as clean as possible. Dry it, and rub it with a cut lemon or a little vinegar. Draw a sharp knife just through the skin in the thickest part of the middle of the back on the dark side of the fish. This is to keep the skin from cracking on the white side. Put as much cold water as will be required to cover the fish into a turbot-kettle, and dissolve in this a little salt in the proportion of six ounces of salt to a gallon of water. Bring the water to the boil and remove the scum as it rises. Lay the turbot, white side up, on a fish-strainer, lower it into the boiling water, and draw the pan back at once and simmer the fish very gently until it is done enough. As soon as this point is reached, take it up, drain the water from it, and slip it, the white side up, upon a hot dish covered with a napkin or fishpaper. Garnish with parsley, cut lemon, and scraped horse-radish, and if it should happen unfortunately that the fish is at all cracked, lay two or three little pieces of parsley upon it, so as to cover the crack. Plain melted butter, shrimp sauce, anchovy sauce, Dutch sauce, and lobster sauce may all be served with boiled turbot. When lobster sauce is used, a little of the spawn may be rubbed through a sieve and sprinkled over the fish. Some cooks have an idea that the best parts of the fish lie in the back, therefore they dish the turbot with the dark side uppermost. However this may be, the turbot looks best with the white side on the top. It is impossible to give the exact time for boiling, as turbot varies much in thickness as well as in size. When the flesh appears to shrink from the bone it is done, and it should be carefully watched, as if it boils too long it will be broken and spoilt. Time, a moderate-sized turbot, fifteen to twenty minutes to simmer gently from the time the water boils; large, twenty to thirty-five minutes. Probable cost, uncertain.
A late-Victorian method for a whole flatfish, written when turbot came to table as a centrepiece and a purpose-built kettle was standard equipment. Most of it still works; the equipment and the salt level need translating.
- The hinge: score the dark sideThe shallow cut through the skin along the thickest part of the back gives the flesh somewhere to expand so the presentation side stays intact. Skip it and the white skin splits as the fish swells, which is the failure the recipe supplies a parsley remedy for when it comes to garnishing.
- Turbot-kettle substitutesA turbot-kettle is a wide, shallow, diamond-shaped pan sized to the fish. A large roasting tin on two burners, or a deep roasting tin covered with foil, will hold a 4-6 lb turbot; line it with a doubled sheet of muslin or parchment with long ends to lift the fish out in one piece.
- The brine is strongSix ounces of salt to a gallon is about 170 g to 4.5 litres (the imperial gallon), roughly 3.7 percent — a shade saltier than seawater. It firms the flesh and seasons it, but a whole fish sitting in it for half an hour will taste noticeably salty. Half that strength suits most modern palates.
- "Simmer very gently" means barely movingDrawing the pan back off the heat the moment the fish goes in is the point: aim for water well below a boil, with no more than an occasional bubble — in practice something like 170-180F. A rolling boil tears flatfish apart along the flakes.
- Doneness by temperatureThe shrink-from-the-bone test works but is late. Cooks aiming for the moistest result pull the fish at 130-135F at the thickest part beside the backbone, with the flesh parting cleanly from the bone; official guidance is 145F. Turbot has enough collagen to stay moist, but it goes cottony if pushed much past that.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn British cookery books of this period plain melted butter means a butter sauce thickened with a little flour and water, not simply butter melted in a pan. Dutch sauce is essentially hollandaise. Both have their own entries in Cassell's.
- Lobster spawnThe dark greenish raw roe (coral) turns coral-red when cooked and was sieved over the fish for colour. Coral is seasonal and not always available from a fishmonger; smoked paprika or nothing at all is the practical answer.
- Yield and substitutesReckon about 12 oz of whole flatfish per person, so a turbot of 4-5 lb serves six. Brill takes the same treatment and is usually cheaper; halibut is firmer and needs closer watching.
Turbot was among the most prized fish on the Victorian table, and its status explains why a household dictionary devotes this much space to keeping the skin uncracked: the fish arrived whole on a napkin-lined dish and was looked at before it was eaten. The diamond-shaped turbot-kettle took its name from the fish, though it served for large flat fish generally, and its presence in a batterie de cuisine signalled a kitchen that expected to serve fish at formal dinners. The dark-side-versus-white-side dispute the entry reports was evidently a live one among nineteenth-century cooks; the gelatinous fins and the fringe of skin the recipe insists on preserving were prized for much the reason we now value such cuts in braises, being rich in collagen. Turbot's price is left as "uncertain" presumably because it was bought by weight at market and fluctuated.