Home › Grey Mullet › Grey Mullet
Grey Mullet
Mulets au beurre fondu are broiled, and served with melted-butter sauce. They are also served au vert, with green sauce; or sauce piment, with capsicum sauce.
PERCH.
Perches à l'Espagnole are baked and served in a brown sauce.
Filets de perches à la Romaine are fillets seasoned with oil and herbs, fried, and served with tomato sauce.
They may be dressed in the same way as carp, tench, and trout; and also in a water souché.
PIKE.
Brochet farci is stuffed and baked. Served with Matelote sauce, it is called en matelote. sauce au beurre d'anchois-boiled, and served with anchovy sauce; aux câpres, with caper sauce. au bleu-pickled. à la Russe is served with horseradish sauce.
PILCHARDS.
Pélamides are dressed in the ways suggested for herrings.
PLAICE.
Plie au gratin is baked in brown sauce, covered with breadcrumbs. à la Portugaise is stuffed and baked; served in tomato sauce with slices of Spanish onions and tomatoes. à l'Américaine is stuffed with a tomato stuffing, baked, and served in tomato sauce.
Five fish share this page: grey mullet, perch, pike, pilchard and plaice. It is the freshwater and inshore corner of the chapter, and it contains the book’s single most misleading gloss.
- Au bleu does not mean pickledThe page glosses brochet au bleu as pickled. Au bleu is poaching a very fresh fish in a court-bouillon sharpened with vinegar, which turns the skin a blue-grey. The vinegar is in the cooking liquid, not in a preserving brine, and nothing is pickled at all. This is a place where the shorthand actively misinforms.
- Pike has bones you cannot pullBrochet is pike, and pike carries fine forked bones inside the muscle that will not come out in a line. That is why the page stuffs it, bakes it, or buries it in sauce, and why French kitchens turned most of their pike into quenelles, where the flesh is sieved and the bones stay behind.
- Check the pilchard headingThe page files Pélamides under Pilchards. Pélamide is the standard French name for the bonito, a small tuna, and not for the pilchard, which is a grown sardine. Read the English heading and the French word as two separate claims.
- Water souchéThe page says perch may also be dressed in a water souché. That is fish served in its own clear cooking broth with parsley, eaten with a spoon, and the name is an anglicisation of the Dutch waterzootje. It is a dish with no sauce at all, which makes it the outlier in this chapter.
- Capsicum meant heatSauce piment is glossed as capsicum sauce. Capsicum in a book of this period means a chilli pod rather than a sweet pepper, so this is a hot sauce served with a broiled mullet, not a mild one.
- Au gratin was a method, not cheesePlie au gratin here is baked in brown sauce under breadcrumbs, with no cheese mentioned. Gratin in this book means the browned crust, however it is achieved; the modern assumption that gratin implies cheese would send a cook the wrong way.
This stretch of the chapter is the part a London hostess would never have opened. Pike, perch, carp and tench are fish you catch rather than buy, and they are here because a country house with water on the estate ate what the water gave it on the days it gave it. The structure of the page is worth seeing too, because it explains the odd company. The chapter runs alphabetically by the English name with the French underneath, so that a cook and a mistress could work from either language and meet in the middle. That alphabet is the only reason grey mullet, perch, pike, pilchard and plaice appear together: they are neighbours in an index, not on a menu. It is also how a small tuna ended up filed under pilchards, and it is a good reminder that a reference book’s shape can produce errors that no cook ever made.