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Turbot Salad
The remains of cooked turbot will make a most delicious salad. Lift the flesh from the bones, free it from skin and bone, and divide it into pieces an inch and a half square. Season these slightly with pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar, cover the dish on which they are, and leave them in a cool place till wanted. Wash two large fresh lettuces or any suitable salad. Dry them perfectly by putting them in small quantities at a time into a clean cloth, then taking this up loosely by the four corners and shaking the moisture from the leaves. Cut them into neat pieces half an inch broad, and leave them in an airy place till wanted. Beat the raw yolks of two fresh eggs for two or three minutes, and mix with them a spoonful of mixed mustard, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and a little white pepper. Add, first by drops and afterwards by tea-spoonfuls, four table-spoonfuls of Lucca oil, and beat the sauce well for a minute between every addition. Afterwards stir in gradually a tea-spoonful of good French vinegar and a few drops of tarragon vinegar. Add more oil and vinegar in the same proportions until the sauce is of the consistency of thick boiled custard. Leave it in a cool place till wanted. Arrange the salad just before it is to be sent to table. First put a layer of lettuce lightly at the bottom of the dish. Put some turbot upon it, and repeat until the materials are used. Garnish the dish, in any way that may be preferred, with hard-boiled eggs, sliced cucumber, beetroot, olives, filleted anchovies, etc. Pour the sauce over at the last moment, and in arranging the salad pour a small quantity of sauce over each layer of fish. Time, half an hour to prepare the sauce. It is better for being made an hour or two before it is wanted.
A leftover dish built around a hand-beaten mayonnaise. The sauce is the only demanding part, and everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: adding the oilFour tablespoons of oil into two yolks is well within a safe emulsion ratio, but only if the first spoonful goes in literally drop by drop with constant beating. If it splits, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a little at a time.
- Lucca oilOlive oil from Lucca in Tuscany, commonly specified for salads in British recipes of the period and prized for being mild. Use a light, non-peppery olive oil; a robust modern extra-virgin will overwhelm the turbot.
- Mixed mustardPrepared mustard paste, not the dry powder — English mustard made up with water. "A spoonful" is unspecified here; a teaspoon is a safe reading. It also helps stabilise the emulsion.
- French vinegarWhite wine vinegar. The tarragon vinegar is worth seeking out or making by steeping a sprig in white wine vinegar for a week.
- The fishTurbot is expensive and increasingly hard to find. Cooked brill, halibut, hake or a firm cod loin all behave the same way: they hold in inch-and-a-half pieces without shredding. Flakier fish will collapse into the sauce.
- Raw yolks and cold storageThe sauce is never cooked. Use the freshest eggs, or pasteurised yolks if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, and keep both fish and sauce refrigerated rather than merely in a "cool place". Cooked fish dressed with oil and vinegar should be eaten the day it is made.
- Drying the leavesThe cloth-and-shake method works, but a salad spinner does it better. Wet leaves dilute the mayonnaise and it slides off into a puddle at the bottom of the dish.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities for the fish and no yield; two lettuces and the flesh from a substantial piece of turbot would make a light lunch for a few people. Make the sauce an hour or two ahead as directed, but dress and layer only at the last moment — the lettuce wilts within minutes of meeting the oil.
Turbot was among the grandest fish on the Victorian table, poached whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle and served at the fish course of a formal dinner; a household that owned such a kettle also had leftovers to account for, and this book devotes considerable space to what became of yesterday's joint or fish. Beating oil into raw yolks by hand was ordinary kitchen labour before mechanical whisks and bottled mayonnaise, and the insistence on adding the oil first by drops, then by teaspoonfuls, with beating between additions, appears in other recipes of the period — a reminder that the emulsion was understood empirically long before anyone explained it chemically.