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TURBOT (en Coquilles)
Take the remains of cooked turbot, free the flesh from skin and bone, and cut it into tiny dice. Cook a table-spoonful of button mushrooms, cut small, in a little butter, add salt and pepper, a tea-spoonful of sherry, a grate of nutmeg, and five or six table-spoonfuls of bechamel. Butter some small china shells or other convenient receptacles, fill them with the mixture, and set them on a large steamer, or the strainer of a fish-kettle, over boiling water, until just hot through. Boil two eggs hard; rub both the yolk and white through a sieve, and sprinkle them over the fish. Serve hot on a dish covered with a serviette.
A Victorian way of using up leftover boiled turbot, dressed to look like a made dish. The whole thing depends on the fish already being cooked — the shells are only reheated, never baked.
- En coquillesThe name simply means "in shells": scallop shells, small china shells, or in modern terms ramekins or 4 oz cocottes. Any shallow ovenproof dish of about half a cup holds one portion.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none for the fish. About 8–10 oz of cooked, flaked turbot with the 5–6 tablespoons of béchamel fills four small shells; the sauce should coat, not flood.
- BéchamelA white sauce built on a roux with milk, sometimes with a little fish or veal stock, well reduced and seasoned. Make it thick — a pouring-cream consistency — since the steamer adds no evaporation.
- Turbot substitutesWhole turbot is expensive and often farmed now. Any firm white flatfish or cooked halibut, brill or cod works; avoid anything that has flaked to mush, as the point is the tiny dice.
- Steaming, not bakingThe shells go over boiling water only until hot through, five to eight minutes. Turbot has already been cooked once, and a hot oven will squeeze out moisture and turn the dice cottony.
- Mushrooms"Button mushrooms" here means small whole cultivated mushrooms; a tablespoon chopped is a modest amount. Cook them in butter until the water has gone and they begin to colour, or they will thin the sauce.
- Mimosa garnishThe sieved hard-boiled yolk and white go on at the last moment, off the heat. The recipe wants the eggs boiled hard, which takes about eight to ten minutes; both yolk and white pass through a fine sieve more cleanly when cool.
- ServingThe serviette on the dish was standard presentation for this kind of service, and would also help keep hot shells from sliding about. Four shells make a first course for four, or a light supper for two.
Turbot was among the most prestigious fish on a nineteenth-century English table, bought whole and poached in a lozenge-shaped turbot kettle for a formal dinner, which could leave a good deal of expensive cooked fish for the next day. Cassell's treats those remains as a distinct branch of cookery, and the shell dish was one standard genteel solution: dice, bind with sauce, reheat gently, garnish, and the leftover reappears as an entrée rather than a scrap. The sieved egg garnish is what French kitchens later called mimosa, traditionally explained by its resemblance to the yellow blossom, and it did the same work as a modern dusting of paprika or parsley — signalling that a plain white dish had been finished by someone who knew what they were doing.