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Rougets à la Vénitienne
Five red Mullets. (Red Mullets.) Ingredients.
A dessertspoonful each of chopped Parsley, Onions and Mushrooms.
Two tablespoonfuls of Salad Oil.
A glass of Sherry.
The book prints only the ingredient line for this one; the method belonged to the demonstration lesson and never made it onto the page. What follows covers the quantities, the fish, and the assumptions a Victorian cook would have supplied without being told.
- No method is givenThis entry is an ingredient list, not a set of instructions; the working method is missing from the page. Treat it as a shopping list to be paired with a modern red mullet recipe rather than something to follow start to finish.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so the parsley, onion and mushroom come to about two teaspoons each, finely chopped. Together they amount to a small dry duxelles-type mixture, though with no method printed its use here can only be guessed at.
- A glass of SherryIn British cookery writing of this period a wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure was never standardised and the recipe says only "a glass". On that reading it gives a moistening of the pan, not a poaching liquid.
- Salad OilVictorian "salad oil" usually meant olive oil, though the term also covered other bland table oils. Two tablespoons is enough to film the dish and coat the fish.
- The fishRed mullet (Mullus surmuletus) is not the grey mullet sold in most markets and has no relation to it. If you cannot get it, small red snapper, or porgy of about 6 oz each, behave similarly under the same treatment.
- The liverRed mullet is traditionally cooked ungutted, or gutted with the liver left in; that liver is prized by French and Italian cooks. A fishmonger will strip it out unless told otherwise.
- YieldFive fish, one apiece, serve five as a course.
Red mullet has been a luxury fish since antiquity — the Romans paid absurd prices for large specimens and kept them alive to be admired before cooking — and it kept that standing on nineteenth-century British menus. The fish is sometimes called the woodcock of the sea, a nickname earned because, like woodcock, it was cooked and eaten with its liver and entrails intact rather than drawn. The dressing here — parsley, onion and mushroom chopped fine, oil and a glass of sherry — is the standard aromatic mixture that turns up under various regional labels in Victorian professional cookery; "à la Vénitienne" in this period seems often to have been a loose menu term rather than a fixed formula, and books of the era apply it to quite different preparations, though a sauce vénitienne of settled composition also existed in classical practice. That the entry survives as ingredients alone is typical of a cookery-school volume, where the printed page was a memorandum for a lesson the reader had already watched.