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Whiting, Souffle Of
Skin and clean three medium-sized whiting, take out the bones, and chop the fish finely. Butter a souffle tin, and fasten a well-buttered paper band round the top; sprinkle the inside with a few browned bread-crumbs. Put three ounces of butter into a stewpan; when hot stir in two ounces of flour, and cook for a little while without browning. Add half a pint of milk, stir briskly until smooth, then add a gill of cream, and cook a little longer, stirring all the while. Remove from the fire, cool a little, work in the yolks of four eggs, a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence, and lastly the fish. Mix well, and season with pepper and salt. Whisk the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, add this to the mixture, pour it into the tin, and bake in a moderate oven for about forty minutes.
A late-Victorian fish soufflé built on a very stiff panade — the base is closer to a thick choux paste than to a modern béchamel, which is what lets it carry a pound of chopped raw fish.
- The hingeThe fish goes in raw and finely chopped, so it must be genuinely fine — pulse it in a food processor to a coarse paste rather than dicing it. Lumps of raw whiting weigh the mixture down and it will not rise past them.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as around 350F/175C. Forty minutes at that heat would suit a deep souffle dish of roughly 1.5 quarts; the centre should be set with only the faintest wobble.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. Half a pint of milk in an English book of this date is 10 fl oz, not 8.
- WhitingA small, lean, delicate member of the cod family, sold in Britain whole and cheap. In the US the name is applied to several unrelated fish; hake, haddock or pollock all substitute well. Three medium whiting yield roughly 12–14 oz of skinned, boned flesh.
- Souffle tin and paper bandThe buttered paper collar extends the vessel so the soufflé can climb above the rim. Parchment tied with string does the same job; a straight-sided ceramic dish replaces the tin. Butter, then crumbs, then chill the dish before filling.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract still sold in British shops. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a teaspoon of Asian fish sauce, gives the same background savour. Season for salt after it goes in, not before.
- Folding the whitesLighten the heavy base with a third of the whites beaten in properly, then fold the rest in gently. Trying to fold all the whites into a cold, stiff panade in one go breaks them down.
- ServingServes four as a first course, two or three as a light main. It must go straight from oven to table; shrimp sauce or plain melted butter with lemon are accompaniments often given for whiting in period books, though this recipe names none.
Fish souffles were a fixture of the English dinner table in the later Victorian decades, when French technique had settled firmly into upper-middle-class British cooking and the souffle had become a standard way to present an inexpensive, mild fish as something worth a course of its own. Whiting was ideal for it: abundant on British coasts, very cheap, and so soft-fleshed and bland that it was more often treated as a vehicle than a flavour — which explains the anchovy essence, a bottled savoury corrective that recurs in Cassell's wherever a dish risks tasting of nothing. The dictionary format of the book, arranging dishes alphabetically under their chief ingredient, meant a cook could look up whatever the fishmonger had that morning and find several ways to use it, from plain frying up to a construction like this one requiring a stewpan, a paper collar and precise timing.