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WHITING, HOT PIE OF FILLETS OF (Careme's recipe)
Take the fillets of fifteen small whiting, wash and trim them without taking off the skins. Season highly with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Spread thinly over them a forcemeat of crayfish, with truffles or mushrooms; roll up the fillet (beginning at the small end) quite round. When thus prepared, spread some of the same forcemeat at the bottom and sides of the pie; place upright upon it ten of the fillets, which should thus cover the bottom; pour upon them two spoonfuls of butter scarcely melted, and put in two more layers of the fillets (ten in each) and pour two or more spoonfuls of butter over them, with two bay-leaves added. Finish the pie in the usual way, and bake it an hour and a quarter; at the time of serving pour off all the fat, and mask with a ragout of carp-roes, crayfish-tails, mushrooms, and artichoke bottoms, with tomato or Espagnole Sauce and lemon-juice.
This is a Carême show-piece written for a professional brigade, and it assumes a great deal of unstated knowledge — above all that the pastry, not the fish, governs the baking time. A few translations make it workable.
- The hinge: it is a raised pieThe hinge: "Finish the pie in the usual way" most likely means lining a mould or raised crust with pastry, covering it and venting the lid, though the recipe does not say so. The hour and a quarter is what stiff pastry needs; the whiting itself cooks in a fraction of that and will be dry unless the forcemeat and butter insulate it. A thicker forcemeat layer and a genuinely cold pie before it goes in are the two things that keep the fish edible.
- Quantity and yieldFifteen small whiting give thirty fillets, which matches the three layers of ten. The recipe gives no yield, but a pie on that scale would serve a large table, cut in slices with the ragout spooned over.
- WhitingEuropean whiting (Merlangius merlangus) is a small, soft-fleshed member of the cod family, not the North American fish sold under the same name. Small haddock, pollock or hake fillets behave similarly; anything flaky and thin enough to roll will do.
- "Spoonfuls of butter scarcely melted"Read a spoonful as a generous tablespoon. Note that the butter goes in twice, not three times: two spoonfuls over the first layer and two or more over the upper two, so a few ounces in all. It should be soft and barely liquid, not clarified and hot, or it runs straight to the bottom.
- Crayfish forcemeatA pounded paste of crayfish tail meat with panada and butter, sieved smooth. Cooked crayfish tails are sold frozen; langoustine or shrimp make a very similar forcemeat. The recipe gives no quantity, but something like a pound of shellfish meat would be needed to coat thirty fillets and line the mould.
- Carp roes and artichoke bottomsSoft carp roe is now hard to find outside specialist fishmongers; herring milt or shad roe stands in. "Artichoke bottoms" are the trimmed hearts of globe artichokes, poached, and the tinned or frozen ones are perfectly acceptable here.
- EspagnoleThe brown sauce of the classical repertoire, built on brown roux and veal stock and reduced over hours. A well-made demi-glace is the practical substitute; the lemon juice at the end is not optional, since it is what cuts the butter and the reduction.
- DegreasingPouring off the fat before masking matters more than it sounds. Several spoonfuls of butter plus shellfish forcemeat render a considerable pool, and the ragout will slide off the fillets if it is left in.
Antonin Carême (1784–1833) worked for Talleyrand, the Prince Regent and the Rothschilds, and his published volumes became the reference point for grand cooking across nineteenth-century Europe; Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s for English middle-class households, folds a handful of his set-pieces into its dictionary largely as models of method rather than as everyday dinners. The dish itself belongs to the tradition of the standing fish pie, where a stiff pastry case functions as a mould and a serving vessel at once and the interior is layered as carefully as a charlotte. What dates it most is the shopping list: whiting was one of the cheapest fish at the London and Paris markets, while crayfish, truffles and carp roe were commonplace enough in Carême's kitchens to be treated as garnish — a distribution of luxury almost exactly reversed today.