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Truffles, Parsley, Mushrooms, and Fish Forcemeat
Clean and wash the fish; dry them well and lay them in a sauté-pan with the teaspoonful each of chopped parsley, onions and mushrooms, the sherry and salad oil; season with pepper and salt, and moisten them with the white stock; cover the mullets with a buttered paper, and cook them in a moderate oven for ten minutes. When done take the fish out of the sauté-pan and keep them warm. Skim the oily substance from the sauce in the sauté-pan; put it on the fire with the brown sauce, anchovy essence and sugar, let it boil for a few minutes, and pass it through a hair sieve. Lay the mullets on a dish and pour this sauce round them. Decorate them with Spanish olives, stuffed with fish forcemeat and chopped mushrooms and truffles. The remainder of the sauce can be handed with the fish.
A late-Victorian restaurant treatment of red mullet: baked briefly under paper in a sauté-pan, the pan juices turned into a sauce with espagnole and anchovy. The written method survives here without its ingredient list, so quantities have to be judged.
- The missing quantitiesThe recipe's method refers to a teaspoonful each of parsley, onion and mushroom, but the amounts of sherry, oil, white stock and brown sauce are not given in the text as it stands. For four small mullets, a tablespoon each of sherry and oil, enough white stock to come a third of the way up the fish, and roughly a cup of brown sauce is a workable starting point.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F/175C. Ten minutes suits small whole mullet; larger fish need proportionally longer. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone has just set, around 135F.
- The buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside. It keeps the fish moist without steaming it as a lid would, and stops the exposed skin drying in the oven's dry heat.
- Sauté-panA wide, shallow, straight-sided pan that goes from stovetop to oven, not a deep casserole. The point is that the fish lie in a single layer with the liquid barely covering the bottom.
- Brown sauceEspagnole: a brown roux moistened with brown (veal) stock and reduced. A common modern substitute is a well-reduced brown veal or chicken stock, slightly thickened. Bottled 'brown sauce' in the British sense is a different thing entirely and will not do.
- Anchovy essenceA commercial anchovy extract, still sold in the UK. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or two or three fillets mashed and melted in, gives the same effect. Add cautiously and taste before salting the sauce.
- White stockA light unroasted stock, veal or chicken in the original usage. A fish fumet works well here and reinforces the dish, though it will make the finished sauce more assertive.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, replaced by a chinois or fine mesh strainer. Skimming the oil off before adding the brown sauce matters; the salad oil will otherwise break the sauce and leave it greasy.
- The stuffed olivesLarge Spanish queen olives, pitted and filled with a fish mousseline pounded with chopped mushroom and truffle. Fresh black truffle is a luxury purchase; preserved truffle peelings or a few drops of truffle juice are the practical substitute, and a plain fish forcemeat with duxelles is no disgrace.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; one whole mullet per person as a fish course is a reasonable assumption, with the surplus sauce passed separately as the recipe directs.
Red mullet was commonly cooked and served whole with its liver left in, and is sometimes called 'the woodcock of the sea' for that reason. Cooking it en papillote or under buttered paper in a shallow pan was one way to keep that flavour in the fish rather than in the pan. The rest of the dish belongs to the grande cuisine of the period, when a fish course might arrive under a sauce built on espagnole and ringed with a garnish assembled by hand stat stuffed olives, forcemeat, truffle stat that took longer to make than the fish took to cook.