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Fried Parsley (Chop the fish coarsely and mix)
Chop the fish coarsely, and mix it with the other ingredients. Fry the shalot in butter until it is a golden brown colour, then add it to the mixture.
When quite hot put it back into the shell, sprinkle with browned crumbs and butter; re-heat it in the oven. The shells should be washed and greased with butter. Serve on folded paper, and garnish with plenty of fried parsley.
This is the finishing half of a coquille — cooked fish bound with sauce, returned to scallop shells and browned. The ingredient list has been lost in the excerpting, so treat the text as a method rather than a formula.
- What the missing ingredients wereThe ingredient list is gone, so this is inference only. Dishes of this type in late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery generally used cooked fish (turbot, cod, salmon, whiting) bound with a thick white sauce and seasoned with salt, cayenne and lemon; mushroom or hard-boiled egg sometimes appears. A quantity of sauce roughly matching the fish, and a single shalot as the recipe specifies, is a reasonable starting guess rather than a formula.
- ShalotAn older spelling of shallot. Chop it very fine; it is cooked to golden brown in butter, which is closer to a slow sweat-then-colour than a hard fry, or it turns bitter.
- The shellsThe recipe says only 'the shell'; for a dish of this kind that almost certainly means scallop shells, washed and buttered as the text directs. Small ovenproof gratin dishes or ramekins serve the same purpose. Scrub any shell thoroughly before use.
- Browned crumbsNot raw breadcrumbs. These are dry crumbs toasted in the oven or in butter until nut-coloured, so they crisp during the short reheating rather than sitting pale and damp.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; it only says to re-heat in the oven, and the filling goes in already hot ('When quite hot put it back into the shell'), so only browning is wanted. A hot oven of around 400-425F for 8-10 minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly, then drop into fat at about 350F for 10-20 seconds until the sizzling stops and the parsley is set and bright green. Wet parsley spits violently, and parsley left in too long goes black and acrid.
- Serve on folded paperA folded napkin or paper doily on the serving dish, the usual period way of sending such shells to table. Presentational; ignore it or keep it as you like.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. By the usual convention, one filled shell per person as a fish course.
The coquille — cooked fish or shellfish, bound in sauce and browned in its own shell — was a familiar way for a kitchen to turn yesterday's boiled turbot or salmon into a fresh course, and it appears in a number of English cookery manuals of the period. Fried parsley was a common garnish for fried and gratinated fish, valued because it holds its green colour and is crisp. Serving on a folded napkin in an entrée dish was a normal convention of formal dining in the later nineteenth century. The title given here, "Fried Parsley," looks like an indexing accident, the garnish having been taken for the dish.