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Turbot, Stewed
Take a small turbot, clean it perfectly, dry it well, and cut it into thin slices. Make a sauce of thin melted butter boiled up with a little salt and cayenne, a filleted anchovy, a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a tea-spoonful of walnut pickle, and a glassful of claret. Fry the slices of fish in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Drain them, and put them into the sauce. Let them simmer gently for five minutes. Take them up carefully with a fish-slicer so as not to break them, lay them on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve immediately. Garnish with sliced lemon. Time to fry the fish, five minutes, to simmer it in the sauce, five minutes.
A Victorian way with an expensive fish: fry the slices, then finish them briefly in a sharp, dark, store-sauce gravy. Everything here is quick, so have the sauce made before the fish goes into the fat.
- "Thin melted butter"In English cookery of this period melted butter means a butter sauce thickened with flour, not simply clarified butter — roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in an ounce of butter with about half a pint of water or fish stock. "Thin" signals a pourable consistency rather than a coating one.
- A glassful of claretA wineglass in Victorian measure is about 2 fl oz (4 tablespoons). Claret is dry red Bordeaux; any dry, unoaked red works, and it will tint the sauce a dull purple-brown, which is expected.
- Mushroom ketchup and walnut pickleBoth are thin, dark, salty condiments, not the sweet tomato ketchup of today. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; for the walnut pickle, use a spoonful of the liquor from a jar of pickled walnuts. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest single substitute for the pair, used sparingly.
- The anchovy"Filleted" means a salted anchovy boned and rinsed, then mashed into the sauce until it dissolves. Two oil-packed fillets, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste, do the same job.
- Buying the fishWhole small turbot is scarce and costly. Brill, halibut or any firm white flatfish takes the treatment well; cut slices about half an inch thick so they hold together through frying and simmering.
- Dry it wellThis is the hinge. Wet fish will not brown in the pan and will shed liquid into the sauce, thinning it. Pat the slices thoroughly and give them a light dusting of seasoned flour if you want a surer crust.
- Don't overcook the second stageFive minutes of frying plus five in the sauce is close to the limit for half-inch slices. The simmer is meant to flavour, not to cook through; keep it barely trembling or the flesh flakes apart under the slice.
- YieldA small turbot of 2-3 lb serves four as a main course. Salt the sauce cautiously — anchovy, ketchup and pickle liquor are all salty before you add any of your own.
Turbot was the prestige fish of the Victorian table, commanding high prices and served whole at formal dinners from the diamond-shaped turbot kettle made expressly for it. Cutting one into slices and stewing them, as here, is a way of stretching a smaller or less perfect fish into a made dish. The sauce is a small museum of nineteenth-century English seasoning: anchovy, mushroom ketchup, walnut pickle and cayenne were the bottled savouries said to be a fixture of the cook's shelf, doing the work that stock reductions and soy do now. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for middle-class households with a servant or two, is full of such combinations, and of the assumption that a fish-slicer \— a broad, flat, perforated server — was among the standard tools of the kitchen.