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WHITING, FILLETS OF (a la Juive)
Remove the fillets from three medium-sized whiting, fold each in two, pare neatly, and put in a deep dish; season with pepper and salt, sprinkle over them two table-spoonfuls of olive oil, a table-spoonful of French wine, and a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley; let them lie in soak for from one to two hours. Drain them, dip them in frying batter, fry in hot clarified fat till of a golden colour, drain on a cloth or paper, dish up on a folded napkin, garnish with fried parsley, and serve with a sauce made as follows. Melt an ounce of butter in a saucepan. stir in one ounce of flour, and cook for a few minutes without browning it. Add gradually half a gill of fish stock, and three-quarters of a pint of white stock, stir until it boils, and let it simmer for twenty minutes. Pound a lobster coral in a mortar with an equal quantity of fresh butter, rub this through a sieve, and stir it into the sauce. Stir in three egg-yolks one at a time. Season to taste with a pinch of cayenne, salt, and lemon-juice. Whisk well over a slow fire, but do not let the sauce boil again. Pass through a strainer, and serve with the fillets.
A Victorian fried-fish dish with an enriched velouté. The sauce is the fragile part; the fish itself is straightforward.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boilOnce the three yolks go in, hold the sauce below a simmer — around 180F/82C — and whisk constantly. Boiling will curdle it into grains, and there is no rescue once the yolks scramble.
- Gills and pintsThis is a British book, so a gill is 5 fl oz and half a gill is about 2.5 fl oz (a scant 1/3 cup). Three-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, roughly 1 3/4 US cups.
- "French wine"The recipe does not specify a type. For a fish marinade a dry still white such as Muscadet or an unoaked Chardonnay is the sensible reading, though Victorian writers also used "French wine" of light red claret.
- Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral-red on cooking. It is rarely sold separately now; if you cannot get it, the sauce works without, though it loses its pink colour and much of its depth. Pounded cooked shrimp or crab roe is the nearest stand-in.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Use a light chicken stock, unsalted if possible, since the sauce simmers for twenty minutes and concentrates.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "hot clarified fat". In modern terms, battered fillets want roughly 350-375F/175-190C. Whiting fillets are thin and folded in two, so they need only two to three minutes; longer and they dry out and the batter darkens past golden.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly before they go near the fat — wet parsley makes it erupt. A few seconds in the oil is enough; it should stay green, not brown.
- YieldThree medium whiting give six fillets, enough for two or three as a main course. The sauce quantity is generous for that; halve it if you do not want leftovers, as it does not reheat well.
À la juive in nineteenth-century French cookery meant fish cooked in oil rather than butter and, in its older forms, served cold — a style generally traced to Sephardi and later Ashkenazi households in France and the Low Countries, where fish prepared on Friday had to be eaten on the Sabbath without further cooking. Frying in oil also kept the dish free of dairy, and the cold fried fish of London's Jewish East End is often credited with shaping the British taste for battered fried fish. What Cassell's does here is characteristic of late-Victorian professional cookery: it borrows the name and the oil marinade, then attaches a butter-and-lobster-coral sauce thickened with egg yolks, which would render the dish neither kosher nor cold. The label had become a menu term for a manner of treating fish, detached from the practice that produced it.</invoke>}<br>{