Plaice, Stewed
onions, 1/2 oz. of ground ginger, 1/2 pint of to taste. AVERAGE COST, 2s INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 or 10 persons.-4 or 5 plaice, 2 onions, oz. of ground ginger, pint of lemon-juice, 1/4 pint of water, 4 eggs ; cayenne to taste. AVERAGE COST, 28.
Cut the fish into pieces about 2 inches wide, salt them, and let them remain for a quarter of an hour. Slice and fry the onions a light brown; put them in a stewpan, on the top of which put the fish without washing, and add the ginger, lemon-juice and water. Cook slowly for 1/2 hour, and do not let the fish boil, or it will break. Take it out, and when the liquor is cool, add 4 wellbeaten eggs; simmer till it thickens, when pour over the fish, and serve.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE from May to November.
A stewed whole-plaice dish finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison, of the kind that goes wrong only at the last step. Read the sauce note before you start.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonThe beaten eggs go into the cooking liquor only after it has cooled, and the pan is then to be simmered gently until it thickens. Keep the heat low; let it boil and you have lemon-scented scrambled egg in a thin broth.
- Missing fractionsThe ginger, lemon-juice and total time have lost their fractions in this text. The ginger is given in ounces, so the lost figure is some fraction of an ounce (a quarter-ounce is about two teaspoons); the lemon juice is some fraction of a pint against 1/4 pint (about 140 ml) of water, and the whole dish runs to something under or around an hour. Judge by taste and body.
- Buying the fishFour or five plaice are to serve 8-10, so they need to be a decent size; no weights are given. Cut across the bone into 2-inch pieces as directed. Fillets work but cook far faster than half an hour, and they will not hold their shape as well.
- The saltingFifteen minutes of dry salt draws surface moisture and firms the flesh so it survives the stew. Do not rinse it off — the recipe is explicit — or you undo the effect and water down the sauce.
- Onions firstFry the sliced onions to a genuine light brown, not translucent. They are the only savoury depth in a pan otherwise full of acid and water, and the fish is laid straight on top of them so they never colour further.
- Keep it below a simmer"Do not let the fish boil" is the recipe's own warning, and it gives the reason: the fish will break. Plaice is soft and flaky, and a rolling boil will not leave the pieces intact for the half hour.
- Average costThe "2s." of the original is a Victorian price for the whole dish and has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
- ServingThe recipe pours the sauce over and serves straight away, though dishes of this type also eat well cold or barely warm. Bread and a plain salad are enough alongside.
Fried onions, ground ginger, a heavy hand with lemon and a finish of beaten egg point away from the plain boiled-fish tradition of the English kitchen and suggest, though the page itself says nothing of it, the Anglo-Jewish table, where cold fish in egg-and-lemon sauce was a standard Sabbath dish precisely because it is meant to be eaten cold and needs no reheating. Similar preparations appear under names such as fish in egg and lemon or agristada. Beeton's household compilations absorbed a good deal of borrowed material without much comment on its origins, so the dish sits here under the flat heading of the fish itself. Plaice suited it well: cheap, plentiful in the North Sea through the summer months the recipe names, and mild enough to carry the sharpness of that much lemon juice.