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WHITING, FILLETS OF (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Take the fillets of four whiting after having washed them clean. Cut each fillet in two, brush them with yolk of egg, season with pepper and salt, and dip them into bread-crumbs and next into clarified butter. Broil them to a fine brown, dish them in circular form, and mask them with Maitre d'Hotel sauce (which see).
A straightforward broiled fish dish that depends almost entirely on the coating staying put and the fish not overcooking. Whiting fillets are thin, so the whole thing is a matter of minutes.
- Broiling means the grillIn Victorian usage "broil" meant cooking over direct heat on a gridiron. Use an overhead broiler or a hot ridged pan; either way the fillets need to be close to the heat so the crumbs brown before the fish dries out.
- TimingCut fillets from four whiting are perhaps a third of an inch thick. Two to three minutes a side is enough, and the pieces are fragile, so turn them once and carefully.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it browns rather than burns and scorches. Melt butter gently, skim the foam, pour off the clear fat and leave the milky residue behind. Ghee can be substituted, though it is cooked further and tastes nuttier.
- The coatingEgg yolk, then crumbs, then clarified butter is the reverse of the modern order, and it works: the butter goes on last as a basting film over the crumbs, not as a wet layer under them. Press the crumbs on firmly and let the fillets rest a few minutes before they meet the heat.
- Which whitingThe book means European whiting, Merlangius merlangus, a small mild member of the cod family. In North America "whiting" is sold as silver hake, which is close enough. Any thin white fillet — haddock, pollock, sole — behaves the same way here.
- Maitre d'Hotel sauceUsually butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, pepper and salt; in some books it is a compound butter, in others a poured butter sauce flavoured the same way. Check the book's own entry. If it is the compound butter, 'mask them' means lay a slice or spoonful on the hot fish and let it melt over. If you make the emulsified version, keep it warm but well off the boil.
- YieldFour whiting yield eight fillets cut into sixteen pieces — a first course for four, or a light main for two or three.
The à la maître d'hôtel tag runs through nineteenth-century English cookery books as shorthand for the simplest of the French butter preparations: butter, parsley, lemon, seasoning, worked cold and set on something hot. The name literally means the head of the household staff, and it attached itself to grilled fish, steaks and boiled potatoes alike. Whiting was among the cheapest fish on the British market in the later nineteenth century, landed in quantity by the North Sea trawl fleet and hauled inland by rail. Crumbing and broiling was a common treatment for a soft, quick-spoiling fish: the coating held the flesh together on the gridiron and the compound butter did the work that a long-simmered sauce would have done for a grander dinner.