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Whiting, with Sweet Herbs
Clean, wash, and dry five large whiting, fill the insides with quenelles of whiting, and lay them in a kettle on a strainer well buttered; cover them with eight ounces of fresh butter in which you have mingled salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg sufficient for their seasoning. Add two pounds of chopped mushrooms, two spoonfuls of chopped parsley, a small shallot chopped and blanched, the juice of a lemon, and half a pint of Chablis wine. Half an hour before serving, make the fish boil, moistening them from time to time with their liquor; then make them simmer gently with the heat applied from above and below. When ready to serve, drain and dish them; pour their liquor over them, and send to table.
A French-style braise dressed up as a plain fish dish. The one thing to get right is the cooking time: whiting is a lean, delicate fish and thirty minutes of boiling and simmering will reduce it to threads.
- Cook it far less than statedFive large whiting stuffed with forcemeat need roughly 15-20 minutes in a covered pan at a bare simmer, not the half hour of boiling then simmering implied here. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone is opaque and pulls away cleanly.
- "Kettle" and strainerThis means a wide, shallow fish kettle with a perforated liner or trivet, so the fish can be lifted out whole. A large lidded roasting pan with a buttered rack, or a wide sauté pan with a sheet of buttered parchment beneath the fish, does the same job.
- Heat above and belowThe original probably assumes a pan on the range with a lid holding hot coals, so heat comes from both sides. No oven temperature is given anywhere in the recipe; cover the pan and keep it at the barest simmer on the hob, or cover it and set it in a moderate oven.
- Quenelles of whitingA forcemeat of pounded raw whiting, usually bound with butter or cream and egg. Whether the recipe intends the raw mixture packed into the cavities or small quenelles already shaped is not stated.
- Butter and mushroomsEight ounces of butter is two sticks, and two pounds of chopped mushrooms will shed a great deal of liquid; together with the half pint of Chablis (an imperial half-pint, about 10 fl oz) they form the whole sauce. Halving the butter still gives a rich result.
- ChablisAny dry, unoaked white with good acidity works; the point is a wine that will not overwhelm whiting. Avoid anything sweet or heavily oaked.
- Blanched shallotDropping the chopped shallot into boiling water for a few seconds takes off its raw bite. It is worth doing, since the shallot is never browned.
- Substituting the fishWhiting is not always at the counter. Any small lean white fish -- hake, haddock, small pollock -- behaves much the same way.
- YieldFive stuffed fish with this much sauce serves five as a main course, or up to eight if the fish are large and portioned.
Whiting was generally reckoned among the cheaper fish on the British market in the nineteenth century, and cookery writers are often said to have looked for ways to make it seem worth serving at a dinner table. This one is thoroughly French in method: a stuffing of pounded fish forcemeat, a bed of chopped mushrooms and parsley that amounts to a wet duxelles, a good white burgundy, and braising with heat above and below in the manner of a braisière, the lidded pan whose sunken cover was filled with embers. A dish of this kind draws heavily on the French repertoire while keeping the ingredients within reach of a middle-class household, modest in fish and rather more in butter, mushrooms and Chablis.