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Ingredients for Purée of Whiting
Half a pound of cooked Whiting.
One teaspoonful of Anchovy Paste.
One tablespoonful of White Sauce.
One tablespoonful of Cream.
Two hard-boiled Yolks of Eggs.
Half a pint of Aspic.
This is the ingredient list for a cold moulded fish purée of the kind served at the Edwardian supper table; the method would have been assumed by any trained cook. The proportions are the useful part, and one or two of them need translating.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups of aspic. Half a pound of cooked whiting is roughly 225 g of picked flesh, which means starting with a pound or more of whole fish.
- WhitingA small, lean member of the cod family, sold whole and often sold cheap. It is soft-fleshed and falls apart easily, which is likely part of why it suited purées. Any mild white fish poached and flaked will behave the same way.
- Anchovy pasteNot tinned anchovy fillets mashed up, but the smooth potted paste, sold in jars in this period and in tubes today. A teaspoon is enough to season half a pound of fish; it is there for savour, not for a declared anchovy flavour.
- White sauceA basic béchamel, made stiff rather than pouring. One tablespoon binds the purée without loosening it, so make it thick and let it cool before it goes in.
- AspicSavoury jelly from a clarified fish or veal stock, set with the gelatine in the bones or with added leaf gelatine. Modern cooks generally use good stock plus gelatine; it needs to be cooled to a syrupy, barely-flowing state before it meets the fish, or it will simply run off.
- Making the puréeThe page gives no method; the usual period technique was pounding in a mortar and pushing through a hair sieve. A food processor does the work in seconds, but pass the result through a fine sieve anyway to catch bones and skin.
- Hard-boiled yolksTwo yolks, sieved, enrich and stiffen the mixture. Rub them through the same sieve as the fish so no lumps remain.
- Yield and servingThese quantities make in the region of a pint of finished purée: enough for a few moulded portions, or to fill a couple of dozen canapé or barquette shells. Being cooked fish in jelly, it should be kept refrigerated and eaten within a day.
Purées set in aspic belong to the high period of Anglo-French cookery, when a cold buffet was judged by its glaze and its neatness of outline rather than by anything on a hob. Whiting was the workhorse of such dishes in Britain: abundant in the North Sea, inexpensive, and prized precisely because its soft flesh pounded down smoothly, which is why it turns up again and again in quenelles, forcemeats and creams in books of this sort. The anchovy paste is a distinctly British touch, a descendant of the anchovy essences and potted relishes that Victorian households kept to sharpen bland fish and sauces. The book prints the ingredients as a plain prose list, with the method following elsewhere.