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Turbot, Ragout Of
Cook one pound of raw turbot, cut into dice in two ounces of butter and the juice of half a lemon for twenty minutes; add half an ounce of flour mixed with half a glass of white wine; boil up, take from the fire, and beat in an egg, with seasoning to taste, and two spoonfuls of melted butter. Butter a dish, coat it with Parmesan cheese, and pour the mixture in. Sprinkle on it more grated cheese, with a few bread-crumbs, and pour over an ounce or more of melted butter. Set the dish in a tin of hot water for ten minutes in a moderate oven, then brown the surface delicately with a salamander or red-hot shovel just before serving.
A late-Victorian gratin in all but name, built on an expensive flatfish and finished under fierce top heat. Two things in the wording will mislead a modern cook: "melted butter" and "salamander".
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn British cookery books of this period melted butter usually means the flour-and-butter white sauce, not simply butter liquefied in a pan. Either sense could be meant here: the two spoonfuls beaten in with the egg would suit the sauce, while the ounce poured over the crumbs at the end may be no more than plain butter.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no figure; conventionally taken as somewhere around 325-350F/160-175C. The dish stands in a tin of hot water, so the interior never rises much above simmering point and the egg sets without curdling.
- Half a glass of white wineAmbiguous in the original. A wine glass of the period ran roughly 2 to 3 fl oz, so half a glass is about 1 to 1.5 fl oz — a splash, not a poaching liquid.
- Twenty minutes is too long for the fishDiced turbot in butter is cooked through in four or five minutes; twenty will give you dry, fibrous cubes before the dish ever reaches the oven.
- Turbot and its substitutesWild turbot is costly and, in some fisheries, under pressure. Farmed turbot, brill, halibut or any firm white flatfish behaves the same way here.
- SalamanderA flat iron plate on a handle, heated in the fire and held above the surface to brown it. A domestic broiler on its highest setting, or a blowtorch, does the same job in a minute or two — watch it, as Parmesan and crumbs colour fast.
- Ten minutes in the water bathEnough only if the mixture goes into the dish hot. Judge by set rather than clock: the centre should be just firm, not liquid, before it goes under the heat.
- YieldA pound of fish makes a first course for four, or a light main dish for two with bread.
Ragout here is used loosely, as it often was in English kitchens — the French word properly means a stew of pieces in sauce, but the term was applied to almost any dish of cut-up meat or fish bound with something rich. Turbot was the grandest of the flatfish on a Victorian table, served whole on its own diamond-shaped kettle for formal dinners. The scattering of Parmesan is a mark of the period's admiration for Italian and Franco-Italian gratins; the salamander, by contrast, was ordinary domestic equipment, and the alternative offered — a red-hot shovel — suggests a kitchen that browned food at the fire rather than in a closed oven.