Turbot
Take a fine large whitefish, steam until tender; take out the bones and sprinkle with salt and pepper. For the dressing heat one pint of milk, seasoned with onions, parsley and thyme; then strain and thicken with one-quarter pound of flour. When cool, add two eggs and one-quarter pound of butter. Put in a baking dish a layer of fish, then a layer of sauce, until full; cover the top with bread crumbs, and bake half an hour. -Mrs C. E. Yost, Omaha.
A layered fish-and-cream-sauce bake of the kind that filled American community cookbooks around 1900. Despite the name there is no turbot in it; the dish is built on whitefish and a very stiff milk sauce.
- The sauce is the hingeA quarter pound of flour is roughly one cup, which against one pint of milk gives a paste, not a pouring sauce. Cook it out thoroughly over low heat so the raw flour taste goes, and expect something closer to a thick panade that you spread between the layers rather than ladle.
- Adding the eggs"When cool" is doing real work here. If the sauce is hot the eggs scramble; let it drop to warm room temperature, beat the eggs in, then work in the softened butter.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated half hour will heat the assembled dish through and colour the crumbs; the fish is already cooked, so this step is about setting the egg-thickened sauce.
- The fishA "fine large whitefish" in an Omaha collection of this date most likely points to Great Lakes whitefish, but any firm white-fleshed fish works. No quantity is given; roughly 2 lb of cooked, flaked, bone-picked flesh will suit a 2-quart dish. Steaming keeps it in usable flakes; poaching does the same.
- Seasoning the milkOnion, parsley and thyme are infused and strained out, so bruise them and let them steep in the hot milk off the heat for ten to fifteen minutes before straining. A half onion, a few parsley stalks and two thyme sprigs is the right scale for a pint.
- CrumbsDry bread crumbs tossed with a little melted butter brown properly; untreated fresh crumbs tend to dry out grey. Finish under the broiler for a minute if the top is pale.
- YieldNone is given; the quantities suggest something on the order of six servings as a main course. It cuts more cleanly after ten minutes out of the oven.
Turbot is a North Atlantic flatfish prized in European kitchens and effectively unobtainable in the American interior in the 1890s, so cooks in places like Omaha borrowed the name for the treatment rather than the fish. The model is turbot \à la crème, a French-influenced dish of poached flatfish layered with a thick white sauce and browned crumbs, which turned up in American cookbooks throughout the late nineteenth century, usually made with whatever firm white fish was at hand. Great Lakes whitefish, shipped inland on ice by rail, was among the substitutes used, and good enough that the borrowed name stuck. The attribution to a named contributor in a named city is characteristic of the period's compiled cookbooks, which gathered dishes from readers and correspondents and printed them much as they arrived.