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Fish or Poissons: Tartare (Filets de merluche la tartare)
Filets de merluche à la tartare are fried fillets served with Tartare sauce. à l'Indienne are served with curry sauce. à la Royale are sauté, and dressed in a crown, covered with anchovy sauce, and garnished with fillets of anchovies and hard-boiled egg.
HAKE.
Merlus à l'Indienne is cut in slices, broiled, and served in curry sauce.
HALIBUT.
Flétan à la Morny. Small fillets served in a cheese sauce. Hake and halibut may be dressed like cod; but, as they are rather coarse fish, a highly seasoned sauce should be selected.
HERRINGS.
Harengs grillés, sauce moutarde, are broiled, and served with mustard sauce. à la crème-boiled, and served with a sauce of cream, butter and lemon juice. à la Bohémienne are served in a brown sauce with red currant jelly. au jus d'oranges-served with orange sauce. farcis are boned, stuffed and baked. en matelote are stewed with herbs, etc. en paupiettes are boned, rolled and fried. en caisses are baked in paper cases. au gratin-baked with herbs and covered with breadcrumbs.
Harengs à la Marinière-boned, rolled, boiled, and served on toast, with the roes cut in small pieces and fried. fumés à la Bruxelloise are fillets of smoked herrings broiled in a paper case with a layer of stuffing between them. Served with pieces of lemon.
For Croquettes de harengs they are broiled, made into balls with mashed potatoes, and fried.
They can also be made into little cakes, or petits pains, and served à la Tartare with Tartare sauce.
The page states its own method outright: hake and halibut are coarse fish, so a highly seasoned sauce should be chosen for them. That single sentence is the organising principle of the whole fish chapter.
- Merluche and merlusBoth are hake. It is a soft-fleshed fish that cooks fast and falls apart if it is moved about in a hot pan, which is why the page poaches or fries it in fillets and sauces it afterwards rather than handling it hot.
- Halibut has changed placesHere it is the coarse fish given a cheese sauce. It is now among the most expensive things on a fish counter, and it goes dry faster than almost any other white fish, so it wants taking off the heat at the point where the flakes have only just parted.
- HerringsNine of these dishes are herring, and that proportion is the real content of the page. A fish once landed in quantities that justified nine treatments is a specialist order across much of the English-speaking world now. Buy them whole and have them boned, because the small bones are why people gave them up.
- Smoked herringFumés covers kippers and bloaters. Both are cured in smoke rather than cooked by it, so they still want a few minutes under a hot grill, skin side up, with a little butter — and no longer, because the fat renders out and the flesh turns to string.
- Mustard with herringThe first dish on the list pairs them and it is not an accident. Mustard, vinegar, soured cream, gooseberry: nearly every treatment here cuts the oil of the fish with something sharp, and a plain butter sauce on a herring wastes both.
- RoesÀ la Marinière takes them out and fries them separately. Soft herring roe is still sold and is very good on toast, and it is also the first part of the fish to spoil, which is the practical reason to buy the fish whole and cook it the same day.
There is a class ladder running down the middle of this chapter and it is written in sauces. Turbot and salmon, elsewhere in the book, get the delicate white sauces and the plainest service, because a fish that cost money was allowed to taste of itself. Hake, halibut and herring get curry, mustard, anchovy, cheese, Bohemian brown sauce with currant jelly — seasoning heavy enough to stand in front of the fish. A book written to help someone order dinner had to cover both ends of that ladder, because an English dinner required a fish course whether or not the household could put turbot on it, and the usefulness of this page is that it says so without embarrassment.