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TURBOT, TIMBALES OF (a la Venetienne)
This is a dish made of the remains of turbot. It requires but little of the flesh of the fish. Cut whatever is left of the turbot into dice as small as possible. To make the sauce, take three spoonfuls of hot bechamel, to which add a good lump of butter, salt, fine white pepper, a little parsley chopped very fine and well squeezed in a towel that it may not give a green colour to the sauce; then add a little cavice. Keep stirring your sauce, which is generally called working it. The French term is vanner--taking up the sauce in a spoon, and pouring it perpendicularly into the stewpan, repeating the operation frequently and very quickly to make the sauce transparent. When it is mellow, and of a good taste, throw in the turbot which you have cut into dice, keep it hot, and when ready for sending to table garnish the little timbales with the turbot. Let them lay for a moment in the oven, and serve hot.
A leftover dish rather than a set-piece: a few spoonfuls of thick béchamel, cold cooked turbot cut small, and pastry or metal timbales to hold it. The whole thing lives or dies on the sauce, which must be thick enough to coat the dice without weeping into the cases.
- The hinge: keep the fish out of the heatThe turbot is already cooked. It is stirred into hot sauce only to warm through, and the filled timbales go into the oven "for a moment"; the book gives neither temperature nor time, so a moderate oven and only long enough to heat through. Any real cooking turns flaked turbot to cotton wool.
- CaviceA bottled sharp, spiced condiment of the Victorian store cupboard, related in name to the caveach pickles used for fried fish, and long gone from shops; surviving recipes for it vary and there was no fixed formula. A little anchovy essence with a few drops of vinegar, or a dash of Worcestershire sauce, gives a comparable salt-and-sharp lift.
- TimbalesHere these appear to be the little cases, not the modern baked custard: either small pre-baked pastry shells or buttered dariole moulds lined with pastry. The book gives no size. Bake or fry them blind and dry before filling, or the sauce softens them.
- "Three spoonfuls" is vagueRead it as roughly 3 tablespoons of thick béchamel. The book gives no exact measure and no quantity of fish, so the sauce should simply be thick enough to hold the dice on a spoon.
- VannerThe lifting-and-pouring described is a real technique: it cools the sauce slightly, works in the butter, and gives a glossy finish. A whisk off the heat does the same job in less time; the point is emulsified butter, not aeration.
- Squeezing the parsleyChopped parsley wrung in a cloth loses its green juice, so the sauce stays pale rather than tinting green, which is the reason the recipe itself gives. Worth doing if appearance matters.
- TurbotWild turbot is expensive and often unavailable; farmed turbot, brill or halibut behave the same way, as does any firm cooked white fish. Pick over carefully for skin and the small hard bones along the fin line.
- YieldAs written it is a savoury or a first course; the book gives no number of timbales or servings, and the amount depends entirely on how much turbot is left over.
Cassell's places this among the turbot entries because turbot was the grand fish of the nineteenth-century English dinner: cooked whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle, served with lobster or Dutch sauce, and often prepared in quantities likely to leave something over. Dishes like this one exist to deal with the second day, and the fact that the technique and vocabulary are French — béchamel, timbales, vanner, and the fashionable label à la Venetienne — reflects how thoroughly professional English cookery of the period took its terms from the French kitchen, even for a plate of reheated fish. Names like "à la Venetienne" were applied loosely in such books and generally signal a pale, herb-flecked sauce rather than any documented Venetian original. The cavice bottle is the English note in an otherwise French recipe, a survival of the older taste for sharp spiced vinegar with fish.