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Darne de Turbot Parisienne
Ingredients.
One pound of Turbot.
One glass of Chablis.
Half a pint of White Sauce.
One tablespoonful of grated Parmesan Cheese.
One teaspoonful of chopped Parsley.
Two floury mashed Potatoes.
Cut the fish in slices, place on a greased tin, pour over half the wine, and cover with a greased paper. Cook in a slow oven. Boil down the rest of the wine, add the white sauce and the parsley. Rub the potatoes through a sieve, roll them into balls the size of marbles, flour thickly, and fry in hot fat. Dish the fish neatly, pour the sauce over, and sprinkle the cheese on the top. Brown the cheese under the gas grill or before the fire. Serve the potato balls at each end of the dish,
A straightforward baked fish dish with a wine-reduced cream sauce and fried potato balls; the only fussy parts are the sauce reduction and keeping the fish from overcooking in a slow oven.
- What a darne isA darne is a cross-cut steak cut through the bone rather than a fillet; in strict French usage it belongs to round fish, the flatfish equivalent being a tron con, though English kitchens used the word more loosely, as here. The instruction to "cut the fish in slices" implies thick bone-in steaks; leaving the bone in helps them hold together through baking and dishing.
- Turbot and its substitutesWild turbot is expensive and often unavailable; farmed turbot appears in some markets. Brill is the closest match, and halibut or a thick piece of cod behaves similarly, though neither has turbot's gelatinous quality.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. A pound of inch-thick steaks under greased paper will be done in 15-20 minutes, when the flesh just parts from the bone and the centre reads about 130-135F. Turbot dries out quickly past that.
- A glass of ChablisThe recipe does not define the glass. In British cookery books a wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though 'a glass' could mean more; err small and adjust. Half goes over the fish, half is reduced separately. Any dry unoaked white will do; the point is acidity, not the appellation.
- Half a pint of white sauceAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so a scant 1 1/4 US cups of béchamel. Make it on the thick side, since the reduced wine and the fish juices in the tin will loosen it.
- Reduce the wine before the sauce goes inBoil the reserved wine down to a spoonful or two of syrup, then whisk the white sauce into it. Adding raw wine to finished béchamel gives a thin, sharp sauce that will not glaze under the grill.
- The potato ballsMarble-sized balls of sieved mashed potato, floured and deep-fried (not to be confused with pommes noisettes, which are cut from raw potato). Use a dry floury potato, sieve it while hot, and let the pur ee cool before rolling; warm mash will slump in the fat. Fry hot, around 350-375F, until the flour crust colours, a couple of minutes.
- Browning the cheese"The gas grill or before the fire" means the broiler, at its highest setting, for a minute or two. A single tablespoon of Parmesan over the whole dish colours fast, so watch it; a light dusting of dry crumbs with the cheese helps it brown evenly.
- YieldA pound of fish and two potatoes serves two generously, or three as part of a longer meal.
The name records both a cut and a sauce convention: darne is the French kitchen's term for a steak of round fish, while à la parisienne in professional cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could signal a white wine and cream sauce with the small scooped or moulded potatoes that came to be called pommes parisienne, though its meaning varied considerably from kitchen to kitchen. Turbot was the prestige flatfish of the period, and recipes for it fill the fish chapters of the grand hotel repertoire. The passing mention of browning the cheese "under the gas grill or before the fire" belongs to the long stretch when gas cookers were displacing open-hearth work in British kitchens, and the author could not yet assume which one her reader had; such double instructions persisted for decades, so they fix no particular year.