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Turbot, Cold, to Serve a Second Time
Turbot is so delicious and so expensive that none of it should be wasted. The cold remains may be served in various ways, the different recipes for which are here given. They may be warmed in white sauce (see TURBOT A LA BECHAMEL and A LA CREME), served with bread-crumbs (see TURBOT A LA CREME GRATINE); they may be made into salad (see TURBOT SALAD), or curried, or pickled, or scalloped, or made into croquettes, or into a turbot pie, or into patties or vol-auvents, or cut into neat pieces, and served cold with shrimp or lobster sauce. The following is a simple and excellent recipe for dressing cold turbot a second time. Remove the skin and the bones, and divide the flesh into neat pieces convenient for serving. Warm any cold sauce that may be left, and stir in with it a fourth of its quantity in milk or cream, and add a few drops of anchovy essence and a little pepper and salt. Put the pieces of fish into the sauce, and let them heat through, but do not let them boil. Serve very hot. Time, three or four minutes to heat the fish.
A reheating method rather than a dish from scratch, and the whole thing turns on one instruction: the sauce must never boil. Cooked turbot has already lost most of its collagen, and a second cooking at a rolling heat will shred the flakes and squeeze out moisture.
- The hinge: below a simmerKeep the sauce at the point where it barely trembles and slide the fish in off the heat if need be. Three or four minutes is enough for pieces the size of a matchbox; longer and the flesh goes cottony.
- Food safety for leftoversCooked fish should have gone into the refrigerator within two hours of the first meal and be used within two days. Reheating gently as described is fine, but the fish should be piping hot all the way through before it goes to the table, not merely warmed at the edges.
- "Any cold sauce that may be left""Any cold sauce that may be left" — The recipe assumes yesterday's fish sauce is still in the larder; the same page mentions shrimp or lobster sauce for cold turbot. If there is none, a thin béchamel works: 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, and about 3/4 pint milk, seasoned. Note the original then dilutes with a further quarter volume of milk or cream, which gives a coating sauce, not a thick one.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled anchovy extract, thinner and saltier than modern paste. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a few drops of Asian fish sauce, gives the same background savour. Add it before the salt: both are salty.
- Buying turbotWild turbot remains among the most expensive flatfish. Farmed turbot is widely available and considerably cheaper; brill, halibut or a thick fillet of sole all behave the same way in this treatment.
- Cream quantitiesCream quantities — "A fourth of its quantity" means by volume, so 1/2 pint of leftover sauce takes about 1/8 pint (roughly 70 ml) of milk or cream. Cream gives a richer result and is less likely to split at low heat.
- Yield and servingServing — Serve in a hot deep dish with plain boiled potatoes or toast, since the sauce is the point.
Turbot was the grandest fish on the Victorian table, poached whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle and brought out for dinners where the fish course mattered. It was also ruinously expensive, which is exactly why Cassell's gives a page over to what to do with the remains: a household that has served a whole turbot is not expected to throw the second half away. The list of options here — salad, curry, scallops, croquettes, patties, vol-au-vents, pie — is a fair inventory of late nineteenth-century réchauffé cookery, the set of moulds and forms into which any cold cooked protein could be pressed for a second appearance. Anchovy essence, called for in the sauce, was a standard bottled pantry item of the period, used the way a modern cook uses a splash of fish sauce or Worcestershire: not to taste of anchovy but to give a cooked-again dish back some of the savour it lost the first time.