Mullet, Grey
INGREDIENTS.1/4 lb. of salt to each gallon of water. Aver- AGE COST, 1s. each.
If the fish be very large it should be laid in cold water and gradually brought to a THE GREY MULLET. boil; if small put it in boiling water, salted in the above proportion. Serve with anchovy sauce and plain melted butter.
TIME. - According to size, from to hour.
SEASONABLE from July to October. 34
A bare-bones Victorian instruction for boiled grey mullet, with the fractions lost in printing. The proportions are recoverable from Mrs Beeton's other fish entries, but two of the numbers here are genuinely unreadable.
- The missing quantitiesThe salt figure has dropped out of the text; the proportion most often given for boiling fish in this book is 1/4 lb of salt to each gallon of water. The cooking time is likewise missing both fractions, and should be read as a range rather than a fixed figure.
- Realistic timingA whole grey mullet of 1 1/2 to 2 lb needs roughly 12 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer, counted from the point the water returns to heat. Victorian fish times ran long; the flesh is done when it parts cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point.
- Cold start versus hot startThis is the one instruction worth keeping. A large fish goes into cold water so the outside does not shred before the centre heats through; a small one goes into water already salted and simmering so the flesh sets at once. The logic still holds.
- Never a rolling boilDespite the word "boil", hold the water just below a tremble. Grey mullet has a soft flake that breaks up badly in agitated water; a fish kettle with a lifting trivet, or a rack in a roasting tin, saves the fish on the way out.
- Average cost"1s. each" is one shilling per fish, a price note for the household accounts rather than an ingredient. Against the prices quoted elsewhere in the book for turbot or salmon, it is a modest sum.
- Anchovy sauce and melted butter"Melted butter" in this book is not clarified butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce. Modern equivalents: a butter sauce with anchovy paste or mashed anchovy fillet whisked through.
- Sourcing the fishGrey mullet is still landed but often muddy-tasting from estuary feeding grounds; sea-caught fish is cleaner. Scale it thoroughly before boiling, as the scales are large and cling.
- YieldOne mullet of about 2 lb serves two as a main course, or three as part of a longer meal in the Victorian manner.
Grey mullet was a fish of estuaries and harbours, abundant, cheap and slightly suspect: it feeds by grubbing in mud, and cooks have long argued about whether that spoils it. Mrs Beeton's July-to-October season is often taken to reflect when the shoals came inshore around British coasts, and her one-shilling price puts it below turbot or salmon and squarely in the reach of a middling household. The treatment here is the standard Victorian one for almost any whole fish - salted water, a plain boil, and a sauce doing the flavouring - which is why the entry is so short. Anchovy sauce with melted butter was a common English accompaniment to boiled white fish, valued because it added the savoury depth that gentle poaching takes away.