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Scollops of Turbot
Ingredients.
One pound of Cold Turbot.
Half a pint of White Sauce.
One teaspoonful of Anchovy Sauce.
The entry as printed is an ingredient list; the method was carried in the surrounding text of the book, and the assembly is the standard one for a Victorian scollop. Everything here depends on the fact that the fish is already cooked.
- "Scollops" means the shells, not shellfishA scollop (scallop) in this sense is a dish baked and browned in a scallop shell or small individual gratin dish. No scallops the mollusc are involved.
- Half a pint of sauceAn Imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, which works out at a scant 1¼ US cups. That is a good deal of sauce for a pound of fish; the mixture would be loose enough to spoon rather than stiff.
- White sauceA plain flour-and-butter white sauce; about 1½ tbsp butter, 1½ tbsp flour and 1¼ cups milk, or milk and strained fish liquor, will give the right consistency. Period white sauce was sometimes made with stock rather than milk. Season well.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled Victorian condiment, thin and vinegary, still sold in Britain. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste mashed into the sauce, plus a few drops of lemon, gives the same effect.
- The hinge: reheat, do not recookThe turbot is already cooked. Flake it in large pieces, fold it into hot sauce off the heat, fill the shells and brown only the top — 3 to 5 minutes under a hot broiler, or 10 minutes at 425F. Any longer and the flakes go dry and stringy.
- BrowningVictorian kitchens browned such dishes under a salamander; the entry as printed gives no method. A broiler does the same job. Fine dry breadcrumbs with a little grated cheese or dots of butter over the top help it colour evenly.
- The turbot itselfTurbot is expensive and often unavailable; any firm cooked white fish that flakes in sheets — halibut, brill, cod — behaves the same way. Cold poached fish should have been chilled promptly and used within a day or two.
- YieldA pound of fish with this quantity of sauce fills four scallop shells or two small gratin dishes: a first course for four, a light supper for two.
This belongs to the frugal end of grand cooking: a kitchen expected to have cold turbot sitting about, because turbot was among the prestige fish of the Victorian and Edwardian dinner table, served whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle and rarely finished at a sitting. Scollops, scallops and coquilles were a standard route back to the dining room for such remains — cut small, bound in sauce, hidden under crumbs, browned, and sent up in shells so that nobody had to look at a reheated fillet. The anchovy sauce is doing the work the fish can no longer do for itself, and bottled anchovy, cayenne and lemon recur through nineteenth-century English fish cookery as correctives for anything cold or plain.