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Fish or Poissons (WHEN fish is plainly boiled)
WHEN fish is plainly boiled, the French name for it is given on the Menu, with the name of the sauce served with it; as Turbot, sauce Hollandaise, for boiled turbot served with Hollandaise sauce in a sauce-boat.
BARBEL.
Barbeau, or Barbillon, grillé is broiled, and should be served with anchovy sauce; or sauce piquante, with piquante sauce. au Parmesan-pieces of barbel with Béchamel sauce, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and grated Parmesan, and browned. à l'étuvée is boiled in wine, and served in the sauce thickened with flour and butter. au court-bouillon is boiled in a bouillon of wine and water with onions, cloves, herbs and lemon peel.
BASS.
Bar, sauce au beurre is boiled or broiled, and served with butter sauce.
BREAM.
Brême grillé is broiled, and served with brown caper sauce. au vin blanc is boiled in white wine sauce.
BRILL.
This is the opening rule of the fish chapter, and it is a rule about writing rather than cooking: when fish is plainly boiled, put the French name of the fish on the menu, followed by the name of the sauce. Turbot, sauce Hollandaise. The dish is English; only the card is French.
- Boiled means barely movingPlainly boiled fish was cooked in water that hardly stirred, in a long covered kettle with a lifting trivet, and lifted out whole. A rolling boil shreds it. The vessel is the part that has disappeared, and a deep roasting tin with a rack and a sheet of foil over it does the same job.
- Court-bouillon is defined hereAu court-bouillon is spelled out on the page: wine and water with onions, cloves, herbs and lemon peel. The term survived; making one for an everyday fish did not. À l’étuvée, in the same entry, means boiled in wine with the liquid thickened afterwards with flour and butter.
- Barbel is no longer foodBarbeau and barbillon are the barbel, a river fish treated here as a dinner dish with anchovy or piquante sauce. In Britain it is now an angler’s fish, returned to the water rather than sold, and no fishmonger carries it.
- Bream is ambiguousThe French brême is the freshwater bream, while the bream an English fishmonger sells today is a sea bream. The page gives it brown caper sauce or white wine, both of which suit either fish, but they are not the same animal and the freshwater one is coarser.
- Bass gets one lineBar, sauce au beurre, boiled or broiled with butter sauce, is the whole of the bass entry, while turbot leads the chapter. Sea bass is now farmed in quantity and is among the most commonly sold fish on a counter. The hierarchy on this page is not the hierarchy in a shop.
- Butter sauce is not melted butterSauce au beurre in this book is a flour-thickened butter sauce, as its own sauce chapter makes explicit, not butter poured from a pan. Serving a boiled fish with actual melted butter gives you something far thinner than the page intends.
The chapter opens with a naming rule because naming was the difficulty the book existed to solve. An English household could boil a turbot. What it could not do unaided was write the line on the card so that it read like the card of a house that knew what it was doing. Everything that follows is arranged alphabetically by the English name and indexed by the French one, which tells you where the reader was standing: in an English kitchen, with an English fish in front of her, and a blank menu card to fill in before the guests arrived.