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Whiting, in Butter
Clean and skin four whiting, skewer their tails in their mouths, lay them in a baking tin, squeeze a lemon over them, pepper and salt them to taste, put a good-sized pat of butter on each, and bake for twenty minutes. (See also WHITING, BAKED.)
A three-line recipe that assumes the fishmonger has done the hard part. The only real work is the skinning and the curling, and neither is compulsory.
- Oven temperatureThe original names no heat. A moderate oven, 350-375F (180-190C), suits whole small fish; twenty minutes is about right for whiting of roughly 8-10 oz each, less if they are smaller.
- SkinningWhiting was routinely skinned before cooking because the skin is thin, loose and turns slack and grey in the oven. Loosen it behind the head with a knife tip and pull it towards the tail with a cloth for grip. Skipping this step costs nothing but appearance.
- Tail in mouthCurling the fish and pushing a skewer or cocktail stick through the tail and jaw was the standard Victorian and Edwardian presentation for whiting, sometimes called whiting en colere. It keeps the fish compact in the tin; the flesh cooks no differently either way.
- Which fishThe whiting here is Merlangius merlangus, the small North Sea gadoid. In American markets "whiting" usually means hake, which works the same way. Small haddock, pollock or any lean white fish of similar size will do.
- Butter and lemonA "good-sized pat" is roughly a tablespoon, about half an ounce, per fish. Lemon squeezed on before baking rather than after means the juice reduces with the butter into a thin pan sauce worth spooning back over.
- DonenessThe flesh should part cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point and read about 145F. Lean white fish goes from moist to cottony in a couple of minutes, so check at fifteen.
- YieldFour whiting, one per person, as a light main course or a fish course in a longer meal. Bread and butter or plain boiled potatoes would be a plausible period accompaniment.
Whiting was among the cheapest and most abundant fish on the British market when Cassell's was compiling its dictionary, landed in quantity from the North Sea and valued as much for being easy on the digestion as for flavour; it was standard invalid and nursery food, poached or steamed, and appears again and again in Victorian sickroom cookery. The curled tail-in-mouth presentation, generally explained as a way of fitting a long thin fish neatly into a dish, became closely associated with the species. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ran many such short variants side by side under a single headword, and this entry ends by pointing the reader across to the baked version rather than explaining the difference.