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WHITING (au Gratin)
Butter a baking-dish, and sprinkle over it some grated bread-crumbs and a little pepper and salt. Moisten these with a glass of white wine, and add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup and a tea-spoonful of anchovy. Place the whiting in the dish, and strew all about it two tea-spoonfuls of finely-chopped mushrooms, and one of parsiey and shallot. Cover the surface of the fish with brown bread-crumbs, and put it in the oven till it is done enough. Take it up carefully with a fish-slicer, put it on a dish, and serve with the sauce poured over it. If not sufficiently browned, a salamander or red-hot shovel may be held over it for a minute or two. Sometimes the fish is filleted when prepared in this way. Time to bake the fish, half an hour. Probable cost of whiting, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient, one for each person. WHITING (au Gratin), another way.
Take two full-sized whiting, empty, scrape, cleanse, and wipe them, them make deep incisions on each side with a sharp knife to the depth of a quarter of an inch. Butter a shallow dish thickly; sprinkle upon it a little pepper and salt and two table-spoonfuls of fine bread-raspings. Put in the whiting, sprinkle these with pepper and salt, pour gently over them one to two glassfuls of French light wine, and lay upon the fish two table-spoonfuls of finely-minced mushrooms mixed with a table-spoonful of parsley. Melt an ounce of butter, pour it over the fish, sprinkle two table-spoonfuls of bread-raspings on the top, and bake the whiting in the oven. Send a cut lemon only to table with the fish. If it is preferred that the wine should not be used, three or four table-spoonfuls of pale veal gravy may be substituted for it. Time to bake the whiting, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for two or three persons.
WHITING (au Gratin), another way.
After having scaled, emptied, and washed the whiting, wipe them clean. Preserve the livers. Take a fire-proof dish, rub the bottom over with butter, and sprinkle it with parsley and mushrooms chopped very fine, over which lay the whiting. Then take some bread-raspings that are not burnt, and sprinkle them over the whiting, with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg; then again dust the fish over with sweet herbs, namely, parsley and mushrooms, chopped very fine. (If shallots are approved of, you may add some.) Next lay small lumps of butter on the whiting; pour into the dish a glassful or two of white wine, a tea-spoonful of each of the following articles--essence of anchovies, cavice, chilli vinegar, Harvey's sauce, etc.--and bake in a hot oven. The whiting will be done within a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, according to size. Serve in the dish in which they are cooked, with slices of lemon.
Three versions of the same dish from a single Cassell's entry, differing mainly in how much bottled sauce goes under the crumbs. The chief thing to fix is the timing: whiting is a small, lean, delicate fish, and the half-hour of the first version will leave it dry and shredded.
- Timing is the hingeA whole whiting of 8-10 oz needs about 12-15 minutes in a hot oven; the flesh should just part from the backbone. The third version's "quarter of an hour or twenty minutes" is the reliable figure, and the first version's half-hour should be ignored. Filleted whiting needs 8-10 minutes.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" of this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-425F/200-220C. That heat is what crisps the crumb topping in the short time the fish needs; a moderate oven will leave the gratin pale and the fish overcooked while you wait for colour.
- A glass of wineA Victorian wineglass is roughly 2 fl oz (a quarter cup), so "one to two glassfuls" is 1/4 to 1/2 cup. Use dry white; the "French light wine" of the second version means something like a Loire white rather than anything sweet.
- Bread-raspingsThese are the dried, grated outer crust of a loaf, drier and coarser than fresh crumbs, which is why they brown rather than sog in the wine. Dry breadcrumbs or panko behave the same way. The instruction that they be "not burnt" is worth heeding; scorched raspings turn the whole dish bitter.
- The bottled saucesMushroom ketchup and anchovy essence are still sold; Harvey's sauce is not, and Worcestershire is its nearest living relative, since both descend from the same anchovy-and-soy family. "Cavice" is a spiced vinegar condiment of the caveach type -- a good chilli vinegar covers the same ground, and the recipe already calls for chilli vinegar separately. A teaspoon of each is plenty; these are all salt-heavy, so season the fish lightly.
- Whiting, and what to use insteadTrue whiting (Merlangius merlangus) is a North Atlantic member of the cod family with soft, sweet, fine-flaked flesh. In North America the name is applied to several unrelated fish. Haddock, hake, pollock or small cod fillets all work here.
- The liversThe third version tells you to preserve the livers and then never uses them; the instruction is left hanging. If your fishmonger has already drawn the fish, treat this as an option rather than an omission you need to correct.
- SalamanderThe red-hot shovel held over the surface is a broiler. Thirty to sixty seconds under a hot grill will brown the top, but watch it -- the fish is already cooked and the crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- YieldOne whole whiting per person, as the first version says. The second version stretches two full-sized fish to two or three persons.
Whiting was among the cheapest sea fish on the Victorian slab -- fourpence to eightpence apiece, as the entry notes -- and Cassell's returns to it repeatedly precisely because it was a fish the modest household actually bought. Au gratin in this period means simply a dish finished with browned crumbs, taken from the French gratter, to scrape. What dates the recipe most sharply is the list of bottled condiments: mushroom ketchup, essence of anchovies, chilli vinegar and Harvey's sauce were the standard corner of the late nineteenth-century store cupboard, commercially made, heavily salted and umami-rich, and they did for the Victorian cook roughly what a stock cube or a splash of fish sauce does now. Harvey's, generally traced to a London recipe circulating from the late eighteenth century, was one of the best-known proprietary sauces in Britain before Worcestershire eclipsed it. The instruction to send only a cut lemon to table is a small mark of confidence: with that much bottled seasoning already in the dish, no further sauce was thought necessary.