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Turbot, Broiled
Clean a small turbot, and dry it well. Lay it on a dish, sprinkle a little pepper and salt on it, and pour over it four table-spoonfuls of oil and two of vinegar or lemon-juice. When it is to be dressed place it in a double gridiron, and broil it over a slow clear fire. Turn it every five or six minutes, and on each occasion brush it over with the marinade in the dish. When it is done enough--that is, when the flesh will leave the bone easily--put it upon a hot dish, and pour over it some good white sauce, or oyster sauce, or mussel sauce. Garnish with parsley and prawns. Time to broil, about half an hour.
A plain marinated grill that depends almost entirely on fire management: a whole flatfish over a slow, clear fire, basted every few minutes. The marinade is the recipe's engine, and the fish should never sit over flame.
- The hinge: a slow, clear fire"Clear" means a fire burnt down past flaming and smoking to steady embers. Oil dripping onto live flame will scorch the skin long before a thick turbot is cooked through. Set the grate high, or bank the coals to one side and cook the fish beside rather than over them.
- A double gridironThis is the hinged two-sided wire basket sold today as a fish grill. It is not optional for a whole flatfish — turbot flesh is delicate at the edges and will tear if you try to turn it with tongs or a slice.
- "A small turbot"In practice a chicken turbot of about 2–3 lb, which suits half an hour of gentle grilling. Anything larger wants the oven. Whole turbot is expensive and increasingly scarce; brill, halibut steaks or a large plaice take the same treatment, with correspondingly shorter times.
- The marinadeFour tablespoons oil to two of vinegar or lemon juice is a straight 2:1 dressing. An hour in it is plenty for fish; several hours in the acid will begin to firm and whiten the surface flesh before it ever meets heat.
- DonenessThe test given is the right one — the flesh lifts cleanly from the backbone. Turbot is dense and holds heat, so check at 20 minutes rather than trusting the half hour; overcooked, it goes from silky to cottony very quickly.
- The sauces"Good white sauce" for fish was often built on fish stock rather than milk, though milk-based versions were also used. Oyster and mussel sauces are the same base finished with the shellfish and their strained liquor — add the shellfish off the boil, as a minute or two is enough to heat them through.
- GarnishWhole cooked prawns in the shell and picked parsley, arranged around the fish on the platter. Purely decorative by modern standards, but it is what the dish looked like on a Victorian table.
- YieldA 2–3 lb turbot serves four as a main course, three if the sauce is the only accompaniment. Plain boiled potatoes are the obvious accompaniment.
Turbot was the grandest fish on the British table for most of the nineteenth century — expensive enough that households owned a diamond-shaped turbot kettle to poach it whole, and cookery writers treated it as the natural centrepiece of a formal fish course. Broiling was the humbler alternative, used for smaller fish that did not merit the kettle, with an oil-and-vinegar basting marinade. The shellfish sauces reflect how cheap oysters and mussels had been in Victorian Britain, though prices were already climbing sharply from the 1860s as the beds were fished out: oyster sauce was a workaday accompaniment, not a luxury, and appears throughout the book with cod, mutton and boiled fowl as readily as with turbot. That relationship has since reversed on both counts — the oysters are now the costly part.