Entrees
a stewpan with one quart of cold water; let them boil for ten minutes, then take them out; remove the piece of pipe and gristle from each and press them till cold between two plates.
Now fold each one in a buttered paper and braise them in half a pint of good white stock for half an hour; take them out of the stock, and when cold cut them into slices with a sharp knife; dish them up and pour the curry sauce over them.
This is the tail end of a recipe: the page begins mid-sentence, and the ingredient itself was named on the sheet before. What survives is a complete working method — blanch, press, braise in paper, slice, sauce — and it reads as a Victorian fish entrée of the cartilaginous sort (cods' sounds, sturgeon, eel or lamprey are all handled this way), where a length of tube and a strip of gristle have to be pulled out after the first boiling. Do not guess the ingredient from the sauce; treat the method as the useful part.
- What the method tells youTen minutes in cold water brought to the boil is a blanch, not the cooking. Its job is to firm the flesh enough that the pipe and gristle will strip away cleanly, which they will not do raw.
- Pressing between two platesWeight the top plate — a tin of tomatoes is enough. The point is a flat, dense slab that will slice without falling apart, and it must be fully cold before it goes in the paper.
- Buttered paperPeriod kitchens used plain white paper cut and buttered by hand; baking parchment does the same work. It keeps the pieces from breaking up and stops them taking on colour during the braise.
- MeasuresOne quart of water and half a pint of stock. In imperial measure that is roughly 1.1 litres and about 285 ml; if you read them as American measures, 950 ml and 240 ml. Either way it is a shallow braise, so use a pan just large enough to hold the parcels in one layer.
- White stockAn unroasted stock — veal or chicken bones, or a light fish fumet if the ingredient is fish. Nothing browned, since the whole preparation is meant to stay pale under the sauce.
- Braising timeHalf an hour at a bare simmer suits gelatinous cuts, which need time to soften. Lean fish fillets treated the same way would be ruined; if you are adapting the method, judge by tenderness rather than the clock.
- Curry sauce, 1890s senseCurry sauce -- in books of this class this usually means a flour-thickened white or stock-based sauce with curry powder cooked into it, rather than an Indian-style gravy; formulas varied, and this page does not give one, so the sauce would have been described elsewhere in the book.
Curry sauce over a pressed, sliced, paper-braised entrée is a good snapshot of late Victorian high-class cookery: French technique — blanch, press, braise en papillote, nap with a flour-thickened sauce — carrying a flavouring that had become thoroughly domesticated in British kitchens through the East India trade, ready-blended curry powder having been sold commercially in Britain since the late eighteenth century. The blanch-and-press treatment, with a pipe and a piece of gristle pulled out by hand, matches the standard period handling of sweetbreads; some cartilaginous items such as cods' sounds were treated in a comparable way, but the ingredient cannot be identified from this fragment. Books of this type were written for cooks in large households and assumed a larder that produced white stock daily and paper cases and buttered wrappers cut as a matter of course, which is why the recipe can name no temperature and no quantity of sauce and still expect to be followed.