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Fish or Poissons (Filets de plie aux fines)
Filets de plie aux fines herbes are fillets served in fine-herbs sauce. à l'Ambassade are fillets covered with a red fish sauce, sprinkled with Parmesan and browned.
Petits filets de plie à la tartare are little rolled fillets, fried, and served with Tartare sauce.
They are also dressed in the same way as soles.
SALMON.
Saumon à l'Ecossaise is crimped and boiled. à la Hollandaise-served with Hollandaise sauce. à la Beyrout-slices broiled in papers, and served in anchovy sauce with vinegar, Harvey, chopped onions and mushrooms. à la crème d'anchois-slices served in anchovy sauce. à la Cardinal. A whole fish stuffed with fish forcemeat, braised, and served in Cardinal sauce. à la Régence. A small fish covered with forcemeat, to which chopped truffles are added; served in Périgueux sauce. en matelote-served in Matelote sauce. en kari à la Durand is curried and served with rice.
Tranche, or Darne, de saumon grillée is a grilled slice of salmon.
Filets de saumon à l'Indienne are fried fillets, served with curry sauce. à la Maréchale-fillets sauté, and served in Aurora sauce, garnished with shrimps or oysters.
A few lines on plaice fillets and then the salmon. The page is a glossary, but one entry in it describes a step that a modern cook genuinely cannot reproduce.
- Crimped salmonÀ l’Ecossaise is crimped and boiled. Crimping meant scoring a very freshly killed fish down to the bone and laying it in cold salted water before cooking, which firms the flesh so it separates into curds. It needs a fish killed hours earlier, and it is the one instruction on this page that a shop counter cannot supply.
- HarveyÀ la Beyrout calls for Harvey, meaning Harvey’s Sauce, a bottled anchovy-and-spice condiment. Where this book names a bottled sauce without explaining it, it is treating it the way a modern recipe treats Worcestershire: a thing every kitchen had.
- Darne and trancheA tranche or darne of salmon is a steak cut straight across the fish, through the bone. It is not a fillet and it does not behave like one. The bone and the ring of skin hold it together over direct heat, which is why the page troubles to name the cut.
- The colour namesCardinal, Aurora, green sauce: several of these describe what the sauce looks like rather than what is in it. Cardinal is red, from lobster; Aurora is a pale orange-pink from tomato stirred into a white sauce. On a menu card the name told a guest the colour of the plate.
- A whole fish, stuffed and braisedÀ la Cardinal takes a whole salmon, fills it with fish forcemeat, braises it and sauces it. That presumes a kettle long enough to hold the fish and a fishmonger who will prepare it to order. Both are special arrangements now and neither was then.
- Rolled filletsThe little plaice fillets fried and served with Tartare sauce are rolled first. A rolled fillet — a paupiette — turns a thin flabby piece of flat fish into a plump object that will stand up on a dish and hold a sauce.
In the service this book describes, fish came after the soup and before the entrées, and it was one dish or two, plainly dressed, because the elaborate work was still ahead. That explains the shape of these entries: short, and willing to let a bottled sauce into a formal dinner. The other thing to notice is the phrase that closes the plaice section — they are also dressed in the same way as soles. Sole is the fish everything else in the chapter is measured against, the reference standard against which plaice, mullet and the rest are described as variations. That one habit of cross-reference tells you what the best counter at a London fishmonger looked like, and where salmon sat in relation to it: a river fish with a season, grand enough to be sent in whole, and never so routine that the book could describe it by comparison with something else.