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Whiting, with White-Wine 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, and pour over them as much white wine as will cover them. Place them in the oven, and bake gently till done enough. Knead together in a saucepan over the fire an ounce of butter and an ounce of flour. When the paste is quite smooth, moisten it with the third of a pint of water, let it boil, and add the liquor from the baking-dish and a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Take it from the fire, stir into it until dissolved half an ounce of fresh butter, pour it over the fish, and serve. Time to bake the whiting, a quarter of an hour. Probable coast, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A straightforward baked fish with a velouté-style sauce built on the cooking liquor. The only real judgement calls are the oven temperature, which the original leaves as "gently", and knowing when to stop cooking.
- Oven temperature"Bake gently" is left undefined; a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F/160-180C, is a reasonable reading. The recipe's quarter of an hour should suit two whole whiting; the flesh should just part from the backbone and look opaque throughout.
- Buying whitingWhiting is a small member of the cod family, sold whole and often already gutted. Ask for it scaled and cleaned, keeping heads on if you want the fish to hold its shape. Haddock fillets or small hake stand in well, though fillets need closer to 10 minutes.
- Why the scoring mattersCutting to a quarter-inch on both sides lets the wine and seasoning reach the flesh and helps stop the skin shrinking and splitting. Two or three slashes per side, at an angle, to the quarter-inch depth the recipe specifies rather than down to the bone.
- How much wine"As much as will cover them" is generous: in a deep dish it could swallow most of a bottle. A shallow baking dish needs far less, with the liquid partway up the fish; turn the fish once, or spoon the wine over. Any dry white will do; nothing sweet.
- Weights and measuresAn ounce of butter is about 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant 1/4 cup. A third of a pint, in British measure, is a little under 7 fl oz, so about 3/4 cup. Half an ounce of finishing butter is 1 tablespoon.
- The rouxKneading butter and flour "over the fire" means cooking it briefly, not browning it — keep the heat low and stop as soon as it is smooth and smells faintly of biscuit. Adding water rather than milk keeps the sauce light enough to taste the fish liquor.
- Reduce before you combineThe liquor from the dish will be thin and winey. The recipe adds it as it is; if it tastes sharp, boil it down in a separate pan first before stirring it into the sauce.
- Finishing off the heatAdd the last half-ounce of butter with the pan off the fire, as the recipe directs: stirred in there it enriches and glosses the sauce, whereas further boiling risks it separating out and the sauce turning greasy.
- YieldTwo whiting serve two generously or three modestly, with potatoes, as the original states. The "probable cost, 4d. to 8d. each" is a late-Victorian fishmonger's price and no guide at all now.
Whiting was among the cheapest sea fish landed in Victorian Britain, delicate but bland, and cookery writers of the period treated it as a canvas for sauces — fried in crumbs, stewed in milk, or as here baked in wine. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium first issued in the late 1870s and reissued for decades, quotes prices throughout so a cook could reckon the outlay before starting. The sauce is a plain white-wine sauce of the English school: a butter-and-flour roux slackened with water rather than fish stock, enriched with the baking liquor and a final knob of butter, where the French vin blanc sauce is generally thickened with egg yolks. Scoring whole fish before baking is long-standing practice.