Home › The Principles of Cookery › Turbot, Curried
Turbot, Curried
Peel and mince finely a large onion, and fry it in butter till it is quite tender. Rub it through a sieve, and mix smoothly with the pulp a tea-spoonful of ground rice, a table-spoonful of curry-paste or powder, the strained juice of a lemon, and two table-spoonfuls of good stock, and simmer the sauce very gently for ten or twelve minutes. Add a little salt if necessary, and two table-spoonfuls of thick cream. Put in about a pound of cold-dressed turbot, already freed from skin and bone, and divided into pieces an inch square. Let the fish get quite hot, and serve the curry on a hot dish, with a wall of boiled rice round it. Time, altogether, half an hour.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled turbot: a thick onion-and-curry paste rather than a soupy sauce. The whole thing depends on gentle heat, since the fish is already cooked.
- The hinge: warm, don't cookThe turbot has already been cooked once. Fold it in off a hard heat and bring it barely to serving temperature — a few minutes at most. Any real simmering after the fish goes in shreds it and squeezes the cream sauce into oiliness.
- "Cold-dressed turbot"This means leftover poached or boiled turbot, chilled. Roughly a pound of picked flesh, about 450 g, which is what remains of a good-sized piece after skin and bone. Halibut, brill or thick cod loin behave the same way; farmed turbot is available but expensive for a reheated dish.
- The sauce is very shortTwo tablespoons of stock, lemon juice and two of cream will not coat a pound of fish by modern expectations. Cassell's intends a thick paste that clings. If you want something saucier, increase stock and cream together and reduce a little before the fish goes in.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice, sold as ground rice; rice flour is a finer milling of much the same thing. It stands in here for a roux as the thickener, and the ten to twelve minutes of simmering gives it time to cook out.
- Curry paste or powderVictorian commercial curry powders were generally milder and more turmeric-heavy than modern hot blends, though composition varied by maker. A tablespoon of a modern hot blend will overwhelm turbot, which is a delicate fish; use a mild curry powder and fry it briefly in the butter with the onion to take the raw edge off.
- Sieving the onionRubbing the fried onion through a sieve gives a smooth pulp. A small blender or stick blender does it in seconds, but cook the onion until genuinely soft and pale first — the recipe wants sweetness, not colour.
- The wall of riceBoiled long-grain rice piped or spooned into a ring around the edge of a hot dish, the curry in the centre. Around 200 g dry rice is enough for the border and for eating.
- YieldServes three as a light main course, or four as part of a larger meal in the Victorian manner.
Curried fish of this kind belongs to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that settled into British domestic cooking through the nineteenth century, by which time bottled curry paste and curry powder were staples of the grocer's shelf and required no knowledge of the spices inside them. What marks this particular entry as a household recipe rather than a company one is the phrase "cold-dressed": turbot was among the most prestigious of British table fish, served whole and boiled for company dinners, and a large one left a great deal behind. Cassell's devotes considerable space to the respectable second appearance of expensive food, and curry powder — assertive and forgiving of reheated protein — was the standard means of making a remainder look like an intention. The recipe calls for a wall of boiled rice, the period's usual presentation for any curry or fricassee.