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Whiting, Curried
Take three full-sized whiting. Clean and skin the fish, fillet them neatly, and cut the fillets into pieces about three inches in length. Skin two onions and cut them into dice. Put these into a frying-pan with a little fat, place the pan on the fire, and turn the onions about till soft. When they have steamed a minute, put with them a sour apple chopped small. Rub the onion and the apple through a sieve. Place the pulp in a basin, and mix smoothly with it a table-spoonful of curry-paste or powder, a table-spoonful of ground rice, and as much nicely-flavoured stock as will cover the fish. Put the sauce into a stewpan, and when it boils, put into it the fillets of whiting. Let them boil gently till done enough. Put them carefully on a dish; skim the sauce and pour it over them, and send rice boiled for curry to table on a separate dish. If liked, a little cream may be added to the sauce to enrich it, and if it is not sufficiently acid, a little lemon-juice may be stirred into it. Time, a few minutes to boil the whiting. Probable cost, 2s, Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward Anglo-Indian fish curry from the late Victorian repertoire, and one that works well provided the fish is barely cooked. The sauce is built and thickened before the fillets ever touch it, which is the whole point of the method.
- Do not boil the fish"Let them boil gently till done enough" means a bare simmer. Whiting fillets three inches long are cooked in three to four minutes and will shred into threads if the sauce is actually bubbling. Slide them in, drop the heat, and lift them out when they are just opaque.
- Whiting and substitutesThe whiting here is the European Merlangius merlangus, a small, soft-fleshed member of the cod family, not the American whiting sold on some counters. Three full-sized fish yield roughly 1 to 1.25 lb of fillet. Haddock, hake, pollock or cod fillet all stand in, though firmer fish will need a minute longer.
- Ground riceThis is rice milled to a fine gritty flour, coarser than rice flour and still sold as such. A tablespoon thickens the sauce lightly and keeps the dish gluten-free; plain rice flour or a scant tablespoon of cornflour behaves similarly.
- Curry paste or powderCommercial Victorian curry powders were often heavy on turmeric, and a tablespoon of one may not equate to a tablespoon of a modern blend. Start with two teaspoons of a modern madras powder, taste the sauce before the fish goes in, and adjust — once the fillets are poaching you cannot stir vigorously.
- Sieving the onion and appleRubbing softened onion and apple through a sieve is the pre-blender route to a smooth base. A stick blender or small food processor does it in seconds; push through a sieve afterwards only if you want it silky.
- The sour appleA genuinely tart cooking apple — Bramley or similar — supplies both body and acid. A sweet dessert apple will not, and the recipe already allows for this, offering lemon juice at the end "if it is not sufficiently acid". Taste and correct.
- "As much stock as will cover the fish"The amount depends on the width of the pan; for this quantity of fillet expect somewhere between one and two cups of light fish or chicken stock. Add it gradually to the sieved pulp and paste so the ground rice does not lump.
- Yield and costThe stated 2s. is a Victorian shopping figure and tells you only that whiting was a cheap fish. Four to five servings holds true with rice alongside; the "rice boiled for curry" of the period meant plain long-grain rice, well drained and dried off.
Curried fish of this kind belongs to the domesticated Anglo-Indian cookery that filled British household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century onward, by which point curry powder was a shelf staple rather than a novelty. The tell-tale markers are all here: onion and apple sieved to a pulp for body and sweetness, a commercial paste or powder rather than individually ground spices, and rice served separately on its own dish. Whiting was among the cheapest fish on the London market and notoriously bland, which made it a natural candidate for a strongly flavoured sauce — Cassell's, aimed squarely at middle-class households watching the housekeeping book, repeatedly pairs inexpensive ingredients with treatments borrowed from grander tables. The apple is often said to have entered these sauces as a British substitute for the souring agents of Indian cooking, such as tamarind, though the lemon juice offered as a corrective at the end suggests cooks knew it was an imperfect one.