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Turbot Pie
Take the remains of cold turbot, free the white flesh from skin and bone, tear it into flakes, and season with pepper, salt, and a small portion of powdered mace. Spread it at the bottom of a thickly-buttered baking-dish, and pour over it any sauce that was left with it, either melted butter, white sauce, oyster sauce, or any other kind. If there is no cold sauce, put two or three ounces of clarified butter over the fish. Mash some potatoes with hot milk and a little butter, and spread a layer of these (fully an inch and a half deep) over the fish. Rough the top with a fork, and heat the pie in a brisk oven. If it is not nicely browned on the top, put it in front of a clear fire for a few minutes before sending it to table, or hold a salamander or a red-hot fire-shovel over it. Serve very hot. Time to bake the pie, about half an hour.
A leftovers dish: cold cooked turbot under a mashed potato crust, essentially a fish pie built from Sunday's remains. The whole thing rests on the fish already being cooked, so the oven work is reheating and browning only.
- Brisk oven"Brisk" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). Half an hour at that heat is enough to bring the pie through and set the potato crust; the fish is already cooked and only wants heating.
- Turbot, and what to use insteadTurbot is expensive and, in North America, largely absent — what is sold as "turbot" there is often Greenland halibut or arrowtooth flounder. Any firm cooked white fish works: halibut, cod, haddock, hake. Roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of flaked flesh fills a 1.5-quart dish.
- MacePowdered mace is the dried outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg, warm and slightly more delicate in character than the kernel. A quarter teaspoon for a pie this size; grated nutmeg will stand in at about the same quantity.
- Clarified butterTwo or three ounces is 4-6 tablespoons — a generous amount, but the fish is dry and there is no other liquid. If using leftover white or oyster sauce instead, about a cup is right; the pie should be moist, not swimming.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over a dish to brown the surface. The modern equivalent is the broiler for two or three minutes, or a kitchen torch. Watch it: mashed potato scorches before it browns evenly.
- The potato layerThe recipe insists on "fully an inch and a half," which is deeper than many modern fish pies. Mash it fairly stiff with hot milk; a slack mash sinks into the fish rather than sitting on it.
- BonesTurbot bones are broad and flat and easy to miss in flaked flesh. Go through the fish twice; the recipe's insistence on freeing the white flesh from skin and bone is the one step worth doing slowly.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a green vegetable, or six as part of a larger meal.
Turbot was the grandest of the flatfishes in Victorian Britain, poached whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle and sent to table with lobster or oyster sauce — a fish for dinner parties, priced accordingly. That grandeur is exactly why this recipe exists: a large turbot fed a household with plenty left over, and considerable space was given to the second life of expensive food. The mashed-potato crust is the same thrifty logic that produced shepherd's pie and fish pie, using potato in place of pastry because it was cheap, quick and needed no rolling. The instruction to brown the top with a red-hot fire-shovel is a reminder that ranges of the period gave good bottom heat and often little top heat, and that cooks improvised the grill they did not have.