Home › The Principles of Cookery › TURBOT, BROILED (another way)
TURBOT, BROILED (another way)
Marinade the turbot in olive oil, salt, pepper, etc., and broil it on a slow fire: it cannot be sufficiently done in this way in less than an hour. When you serve, cover with caper sauce, which is to be made as follows. Prepare some melted butter with a little glaze in it; when melted, throw in some essence of anchovies, a few capers, and a drop of vinegar. Then give a good seasoning, and pour the sauce over the fish.
A Victorian grill recipe written for a whole turbot on a charcoal fire, with a sauce that is not what its name suggests today. Two points need attention before anything else: the cooking time and the meaning of "melted butter."
- An hour is for a whole fishThe instruction assumes a whole turbot of several pounds, laid over slow coals and turned. A 6 oz fillet or a thick steak wants 4-8 minutes total under high heat; take it off at 125-130F at the thickest point and let carryover finish it. Turbot is firm and forgiving but an hour will reduce a fillet to cotton wool.
- "Broil" means over the fireIn nineteenth-century usage broiling is done on a gridiron above coals, not under an overhead element; the recipe's "slow fire" points the same way. A ridged cast-iron pan or a covered charcoal grill gives the closest result. If you use an oven broiler, keep the fish a good 6 inches from the element so the flesh cooks through before the skin blackens.
- "Melted butter" is a flour sauceNineteenth-century "melted butter" is the English white sauce: roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together, let down with about half a pint of water, milk or fish stock and simmered smooth. Plain liquid butter will split under the vinegar and give you an oil slick.
- GlazeMeat or fish stock reduced until it sets to a sticky, syrupy jelly. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace, or a good fish or chicken stock reduced hard, does the same job. It is there for depth and colour, so a little goes far.
- Essence of anchoviesA bottled anchovy extract in vinegar and brine, sold under several Victorian brand names. Anchovy paste or two or three mashed salted fillets substitute directly; start with a teaspoon, since the sauce also carries capers and vinegar.
- Capers and the drop of vinegarCapers packed in salt should be rinsed and soaked; brined ones can go straight in with a spoonful of their liquor, in which case the extra vinegar may be unnecessary. Add them at the end and off the heat so they keep their bite.
- Seasoning and salt"A good seasoning" is written for a sauce whose other components are already salty. Taste after the anchovy and capers are in and before you reach for the salt cellar; white pepper and a squeeze of lemon usually finish it better.
- The marinadeOil, salt and pepper is the whole of it. Anything longer than an hour in the refrigerator does little, and surface moisture drawn out by the salt is worth patting off before the fish goes on the fire. Oil the fish rather than the grill bars to keep flare-ups down.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size of the fish, which the recipe does not state. Sauce as described makes about half a pint.
Turbot was the ceremonial fish of the nineteenth-century English table, often said to be valued above salmon and sole, and served whole on the diamond-shaped turbot kettle or, as here, on the gridiron. Its usual dressing was plain boiling with lobster or shrimp sauce, so a marinated, grilled turbot with an anchovy-and-caper butter reads as the French-influenced alternative offered under "another way." The sauce itself belongs to a whole family of English "melted butter" derivatives, thickened with flour and flavoured with whatever the larder held: capers, anchovy essence, parsley, eggs. Glaze, the reduced stock called for in the second line, was a professional kitchen staple, generally described as being kept in a pot and shaved off as needed, and its presence in a domestic dictionary of cookery is a sign of how far restaurant technique had filtered into the Victorian middle-class household.