Home › The Principles of Cookery › TURBOT, FILLETS OF (au Gratin)
TURBOT, FILLETS OF (au Gratin)
Take the remains of cooked fish. Free the meat from skin and bone, and divide it into small fillets. Mince three or four button mushrooms finely, mix with them a table-spoonful of chopped parsley and half a shallot finely minced. Season with pepper and salt, and fry them over a gentle fire till they are soft. Spread them at the bottom of a small, thickly-buttered silver--or, failing this, tin--baking-dish, lay the pieces of fish upon them, and cover with a thick layer of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Stick little pieces of butter here and there on the top, moisten the fish with a little light wine, and bake in a brisk oven. If necessary, brown the surface by holding a red-hot shovel over it, or by putting the dish before the fire for a minute or two, and just before sending the fish to table squeeze the juice of a lemon over it. Time to bake, fifteen to twenty minutes.
A leftover-fish dish from the era when a large turbot was rarely finished in one sitting. The method transfers cleanly to any firm cooked white fish; the only real risk is drying it out.
- Brisk ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read "brisk" as a hot oven, roughly 400-450F. The fish is already cooked and is only being heated through while the crumbs take colour, and the recipe itself allows for extra browning if they have not coloured enough in the fifteen to twenty minutes given.
- The hinge: keep it moistCooked fish reheated dry turns to cotton wool. Be generous with the butter and the wine, and pull the dish the moment the crumbs are brown rather than running the clock out.
- The red-hot shovelA salamander substitute. Use the broiler for a minute at the end, watching it, or the top will scorch before the fillets are warm.
- Silver or tin dishSilver first, tin failing that; both are thin metal that heats quickly and could go to table as they were, though the preference for silver is at least as much about presentation. Any shallow gratin dish works; a heavy stoneware one will need a few extra minutes to come up to heat.
- Button mushrooms and shallotThis is a rough duxelles. Cook the mixture until the mushroom liquid has gone, or the moisture will pool under the fish and slacken the crumbs.
- Light wineA dry white — a couple of tablespoons is enough for a small dish. Fish stock or the liquor the turbot was poached in does the same job.
- Bread-crumbsFinely grated crumbs from stale bread, not the dry commercial sort, which absorbs butter and stays pale.
- YieldDepends entirely on the leftovers. Around 12 oz of picked cooked fish fills a dish for two as a main course or four as a first course.
- Leftover fishCooked fish kept refrigerated should be used within a day or two, and reheated right through to steaming rather than merely warmed.
Turbot was the grand fish of the Victorian table — flat, broad, expensive, and served whole on a diamond-shaped turbot kettle at formal dinners. Au gratin here means what it meant in nineteenth-century English kitchens: a buttered dish, a savoury base, a crumb topping and a fierce browning, rather than the cheese sauce the phrase now suggests. The mushroom, parsley and shallot mixture spread beneath the fish is a domestic version of the duxelles generally credited to the seventeenth-century French cook La Varenne, and it does double duty as seasoning and as a barrier keeping the fish off the hot metal. In a dish like this the technique mattered more than the fish: the same treatment was applied to cod, brill, salmon or any remains that would flake into fillets.