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White Fish and Sauce
Take three pints of veal stock; put it into a saucepan with the heads and fins of five haddocks or other fish, four onions, a bunch of parsley, three inches of thin lemon-rind, and a little salt and cayenne. Simmer the liquor for an hour, strain it, and put with it a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice and a large wine-glassful of light wine. Mince the flesh of a lobster or crab. Thicken the sauce with a little white thickening, skim carefully, add a little cream and, if liked, the well-beaten yolk of an egg, and stir the mince into it. Boil the haddocks, put them on a dish, garnish with forcemeat balls, and pour the sauce over the fish. The forcemeat may be made as follows. Tear the flesh of a small boiled haddock into flakes. Mix with it an equal quantity of bread-crumbs, and add a small proportion of chopped parsley. Rub a little butter into the mixture, and season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Bind it together with egg, form it into balls, and fry these in hot fat to a light brown colour. Time, altogether, two hours.
A late-Victorian composed fish dish: a rich fish-and-veal broth reduced to a sauce, poured over poached haddock and garnished with fried fish forcemeat. The construction is sound, but several of the measures and terms need translating.
- White thickeningThis is a butter-and-flour thickening, in effect a white roux or beurre manié, flour and butter worked together in equal weight and whisked into the simmering liquor in small pieces. The recipe specifies only "a little"; add it gradually until the sauce coats, since the amount needed will depend on how far the three pints have reduced.
- The egg yolk is the hingeOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle and go grainy. Take the pan off the heat, temper the beaten yolk with a few spoonfuls of hot sauce, stir it back in, and hold the sauce below a simmer from that point on.
- Archaic measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons. A large wine-glassful is roughly 2–3 fl oz — a quarter cup of a dry white will do; \
- Veal stockHome-made veal stock is now a specialist item. A light unsalted chicken stock is the closest everyday substitute; avoid strongly seasoned commercial fish stock, since the haddock trimmings supply the fish flavour themselves.
- Heads and finsFishmongers will usually give these away if asked. Rinse them well and pull out the gills, which turn a stock bitter and cloudy, and keep the liquor at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil so it strains clear.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings, but five haddocks and a whole lobster or crab suggests a dish for a sizeable table. Scaled down to two fillets, reduce the liquor and the shellfish meat in proportion.
"White fish" here is not a species but a Victorian kitchen category — the lean, white-fleshed sea fish (haddock, whiting, cod, hake) set against "red" or oily fish such as salmon and herring. The method is characteristic of English cooking of the period: a foundation of meat stock, in this case veal, carrying a fish flavour built from trimmings, then enriched with shellfish, cream and egg in the manner of the French sauce normande. Building fish sauces on veal broth looks odd now, but it is often said to reflect houses where a stockpot ran continuously and nothing was wasted; the haddock heads and fins that flavour the liquor would otherwise have gone out with the scraps. The forcemeat balls, fried brown and set round the dish, belong to the older tradition of garnishing a plain boiled fish into something fit for a dinner table — the same instinct that produced fish quenelles and croquettes from yesterday's leftovers.