Home › The Principles of Cookery › Whiting, with Caper Sauce
Whiting, with Caper Sauce
Cleanse, scrape, and dry two full-sized whiting, and with a sharp knife score them on both sides to the depth of a quarter of an inch. Season with pepper and salt, lay them in a buttered baking-dish, and pour over them a large wine-glassful of light wine. Put them in the oven, and bake gently till done enough. Make the third of a pint of melted butter, stir into it the liquor from the fish, and add two table-spoonfuls of bruised capers. Pour it over the fish, and serve. Time to bake the fish, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, whitings, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A plain baked fish with a Victorian butter sauce. The only term likely to mislead is "melted butter," which in this book means a thickened sauce rather than butter in a pan.
- "Melted butter" is a flour-thickened sauceIn English cookery of this period melted butter is butter and flour cooked together rather than butter simply melted in a pan, with about a third of a pint (6-7 fl oz) of water or fish stock stirred in and simmered a few minutes. Proportions vary from book to book. Simply pouring liquid butter over the fish will not give the intended result.
- A large wine-glassfulReckon on about 2 to 2.5 fl oz. "Light wine" means an unfortified table wine rather than a sweet or fortified one; a dry white suits the dish.
- Bake gentlyThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, answers to "gently". A quarter of an hour suits two whole whiting; larger fish or fillets need checking earlier, as whiting is lean and turns cottony once past the point where the flesh parts from the bone.
- The fishEuropean whiting (Merlangius merlangus) is a small, soft-fleshed member of the cod family, sold whole and often unavailable outside northern Europe. Hake, haddock, small pollock or the Pacific fish sold as whiting all stand in; adjust the time to thickness rather than to the clock.
- ScoringCutting to a quarter-inch depth on both sides is worth doing on a whole round fish: it helps the thick shoulder cook at the same rate as the tail and lets the seasoning in.
- The pan liquorStrain it before stirring it into the sauce. Add it off the heat and taste before salting.
- CapersBruising means crushing them lightly so they release brine into the sauce. Rinse salt-packed capers first; two tablespoons of unrinsed salted capers will overwhelm this quantity of sauce.
- YieldTwo whole whiting serve two generously, three at a pinch, with potatoes alongside.
Whiting was one of the cheapest sea fish on the Victorian slab, which is why the recipe quotes it at fourpence to eightpence apiece and treats it as an everyday dish rather than an occasion. It was commonly fried or, in the once-familiar restaurant style, curled with its tail through its mouth and crumbed; baking it whole in wine, as here, is the gentler treatment its delicate flesh actually rewards. The caper sauce belongs to a long English habit of sharpening a bland flour-and-butter sauce with something pickled -- capers most famously with boiled mutton, but also with fish, where the acidity does the work later cooks would give to lemon. Capers themselves, the pickled flower buds of the Mediterranean Capparis spinosa, arrived in Britain as an imported store-cupboard good and stayed in the pantry precisely because they kept so well in brine.