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Turbot a la Creme
Boil 3 pounds of turbot or cod in salted water. Remove from the fire, take the fish out and free it from all pieces of skin and bone, and flake it finely. Boil 1 bunch of parsley and 1 large onion in a little water to extract the flavor. Drain out the onion and parsley and thicken the water with 3 tablespoonfuls of flour, then add 1 quart of very rich milk and 1/2 cupful of butter. Put alternate layers of fish and sauce in a buttered baking-dish, sprinkle the top thickly with bread crumbs, and bake until brown.
A late-Victorian scalloped fish dish, essentially flaked white fish layered with a parsley-and-onion-scented béchamel and baked under crumbs. The instructions assume a cook who knows how thick a sauce should be, so a few numbers help.
- The hinge: sauce thicknessThree tablespoons of flour to a quart of milk gives a sauce barely thicker than cream, and it will run out of the dish. For a sauce that will hold layers, use closer to 6 tablespoons of flour, or reduce the milk to a pint. Cook the flour in the butter for two minutes before the liquid goes in, or the finished dish tastes of raw paste.
- Poach, do not boilThree pounds of turbot or cod at a rolling boil will shred and toughen. Bring the salted water barely to a simmer, slide the fish in, and hold it just below a tremble for 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness, until it flakes. It cooks again in the oven.
- Turbot and its stand-insTrue turbot is a North Atlantic flatfish, expensive and rarely stocked whole in North America. Cod is the recipe's own alternative; halibut, haddock or pollock all work. Avoid oily fish, which fights the cream.
- \"Very rich milk\""Very rich milk" -- in this period milk was sold unhomogenised, and the phrase signalled milk with plenty of cream left in it. Use whole milk with a few tablespoons of heavy cream stirred in, or half-and-half.
- The parsley-onion waterThis is a quick infusion, not a stock. Simmer a bunch of parsley stems and one quartered onion in about a cup of water for 10 minutes, then strain and use that liquid as part of the sauce. Doing it in a little water, as written, keeps the flavour concentrated.
- Oven and browningBake at 375°F for 25-30 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs colour. Toss the crumbs with melted butter first; dry crumbs on a moist surface go leathery rather than crisp. A minute under the broiler finishes the top if it is still pale.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified beyond the poaching water. Season the sauce properly; nutmeg, cayenne or a squeeze of lemon are all in keeping with period cream sauces for fish.
- YieldThree pounds of fish plus a quart of sauce fills a 9x13 dish and serves eight generously as a main course.
Turbot was the aristocrat of the fishmonger's slab in nineteenth-century Britain, expensive enough to be a luxury purchase, and it was cooked in a diamond-shaped copper turbotiere made for nothing else. Recipes like this one, which pair the grand name with cod in the same breath, show how American compilations of the period borrowed the prestige of a European bill of fare while quietly substituting whatever the local market carried. The construction itself — cooked fish flaked, bound in a cream sauce, layered in a buttered dish and crumbed — is the standard scalloped-fish formula that ran through household manuals of the period, and it was equally at home as a way of using up the remains of a boiled fish from the day before. The name à la crème simply signals the sauce, one of a family of French-styled menu tags (à la crème, au gratin, à la Newburg) that gave plain baked dishes a menu-worthy title.