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WHITING, BROILED (another way)
Empty the whiting, scale them, but preserve the livers, which are very delicate. When you have washed and wiped the fish clean, slit them transversely on both sides. Beat the yolk of an egg with a little salt and pepper, and rub some of it over the whiting with a brush. Then dip the fish into crumbs of bread, next into melted butter, and then into crumbs of bread again. Broil them of a fine colour, and serve up. The sauce is to be sent up separately in a boat, whether it is anchovy sauce or melted butter: the reason for which is that if you were to pour the sauce over the fish, the whiting would not prove palatable, and the sauce would get too thick.
A Victorian grilled fish, straightforward once you translate the vocabulary. The whole point of the method is a crisp crumb crust and a sauce that stays fluid, which is why the sauce goes to table separately.
- "Broil" means grillIn a British book of this period broiling is cooking over or under direct radiant heat — a gridiron over coals, or a modern overhead grill/broiler set high. It is not oven roasting; the crumbs need direct heat to colour.
- Fish size and timingWhiting are small fish, usually well under a pound whole. The recipe gives no times; under a hot grill, allow roughly 4-5 minutes a side, turning once, until the crumbs are brown and the flesh at the backbone is opaque. The scoring may shorten this a little.
- Why slit them transverselyThe cuts across both flanks help stop the fish curling as the skin contracts, and let heat into the thicker flesh near the head.
- The liversThe recipe's own instruction to preserve the livers, 'which are very delicate', shows they were valued. Fish are now generally gutted before they reach the counter, so you will usually have to accept the fish without them.
- The crumbing sequenceEgg yolk, crumbs, melted butter, crumbs again — the butter between the two crumb layers is what browns and crisps. Dry white breadcrumbs are the usual choice for this kind of crumbing.
- Anchovy sauceNineteenth-century anchovy sauce is melted butter sauce (a butter-and-flour sauce thinned with water or fish stock) seasoned with anchovy essence. Anchovy paste or mashed salted anchovy in a butter sauce gives the same effect; the bottled brown "anchovy sauce" of today is a different, sharper condiment.
- Buying nowWhiting is landed but not always on the counter. Small haddock, hake, pollock or a pair of small pollock fillets behave the same way under a grill; oily fish will not.
- YieldOne fish per person, with the sauce in a jug or boat as the original insists — poured over, it soaks the crust and the crumbs thicken it into paste.
Whiting (Merlangius merlangus) was one of the cheapest and most abundant fish in the Victorian British market, landed in quantity from the North Sea and the Channel and valued for flesh so light and low in fat that it was a standard item in invalid and children's cookery — hence the several entries for it in general household reference works, which often give boiled, fried, baked and broiled treatments of the same fish in succession. The little liver was genuinely esteemed, as this recipe's own instruction to preserve it shows. Whiting were also once commonly presented curled in a ring, with the tail fastened through or into the head — a practice sometimes explained by the need to fit a long, slender fish onto a round dish, and the background to the Mock Turtle's question in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland about whether one has ever seen a whiting with its tail in its mouth. The insistence on sauce in a boat has a practical basis, which the recipe states itself: flour-thickened melted butter sauce stiffens rapidly once it meets bread.