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Flounders au Gratin
Cut up parsley, shallot, and small button-mushrooms very finely. Fry them in butter, with a seasoning of salt and pepper. Cover the bottom of a tin flat baking-dish, previously buttered, with the herbs, and lay on them a flounder, neatly trimmed, or fillets of any flat fish. Strew bread crumbs thickly over, and bits of butter on the top of all. Moisten with white wine. Cook carefully. Crisp the top with a salamander. Serve very hot and with a squeeze of lemon over the dish. Time, twenty minutes.
A duxelles-and-crumb gratin of flat fish, written for a cook who owned a salamander and judged the oven by hand. Two details need translating: the heat and the timing.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies none, saying only "Cook carefully"; it does not even name an oven. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, suits the dish: lower and the crumbs go soft before the fish sets; much higher and the butter browns before the flesh is opaque.
- Twenty minutes is for a whole fishTwenty minutes -- The recipe gives one time for both the whole trimmed flounder and the fillets. Twenty minutes suits a whole fish of about 1 lb; fillets will likely be done sooner, as soon as the flesh flakes at the thickest point, so check them early.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the dish to glaze the top. Use the broiler for the last minute or two, watching it, since buttered crumbs colour very fast.
- The herb bed is a duxellesParsley, shallot and mushrooms chopped fine and fried in butter until the mushroom liquid has gone is essentially duxelles. Cook off that moisture properly or it will water down the wine and steam the fish instead of roasting it.
- Button mushrooms"Small button-mushrooms" in period usage means immature, tightly closed cultivated mushrooms. Ordinary white or cremini, finely chopped, do the same work.
- Quantities, unstatedFor a 1 lb flounder: roughly 4 oz mushrooms, one shallot, a good handful of parsley, 2 oz butter in all, and about 1/4 cup dry white wine — enough to moisten, not to poach.
- Dish and yieldA "tin flat baking-dish" is a shallow metal roasting tin; any shallow ovenproof dish that holds the fish in one layer works. The recipe gives no yield, but a single flounder of this sort would serve one or two.
- Lemon at the tableThe squeeze of lemon goes over the finished dish, not into the cooking. Added early it dulls the wine and the butter.