Turbot au Gratin
INGREDIENTS. -Remains of cold turbot, béchamel (see Sauces), bread-crumbs, butter.
Cut the flesh of the turbot into small dice, carefully freeing it from all skin and bone.
Put them into a stewpan, and moisten with 4 or 5 tablespoonfuls of béchamel.
Let it get thoroughly hot, but do not allow it to boil. Spread the mixture on a dish, cover with finely-grated bread-crumbs, and TURBOT, FILLETS OF.
TURKEY, BOILED. piace small pieces of butter over the top. a little rosemary. AVERAGE COST, 7s. to Brown it in the oven, or with a salamander.
TIME.-Altogether, 1/2 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Turbot à l'Italienne, Fillets of.-INGREDIENTS. - The remains of cold turbot, Italian sauce.
Clear the flesh carefully from the bone, and take away all skin, which gives an unpleasant flavour to the sauce. Make the sauce hot, lay in the fish to warm through, but do not let it boil. Garnish with croûtons.
TIME.-5 minutes.
SEASONABLE all the year.
A leftovers dish: cooked turbot bound in béchamel, crumbed and browned. The whole point is reheating without recooking, so the fish stays in flakes rather than turning to paste.
- Never let it boilOnce the diced fish is in the sauce it needs only to come up to serving heat. Boiling shrinks the flakes, squeezes out water and thins the béchamel into a puddle under the crumb crust.
- Skin and boneThe instruction to free the flesh carefully is not fussiness. Turbot skin carries a strong gelatinous flavour that dominates a delicate béchamel, and the bones are fine enough to be missed in a creamy mixture.
- QuantitiesNo weight of fish is given because this is a using-up dish; the only measure is the 4 or 5 tablespoonfuls of bechamel. How much picked fish that will moisten is not stated, so judge by eye: the mixture should be moist and just holding together, not soupy.
- BéchamelBechamel -- Mrs Beeton's bechamel is a rich white sauce thickened with butter and flour, made with white stock and cream or milk, seasoned and strained. A plain medium white sauce made with milk, or with milk eked out by any of the fish's cooking liquor that has been kept, does the same job.
- Bread-crumbsFinely grated crumbs here means dry crumbs from stale bread, not the soft fresh sort and not the coarse commercial kind. Dry crumbs brown evenly under a fierce top heat instead of soaking up the sauce.
- SalamanderA salamander was a flat iron disc on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over a dish to glaze the top. A domestic grill or broiler at full heat, the dish set close beneath it, is the direct equivalent.
- Oven browningIf browning in the oven rather than under a grill, the recipe gives no temperature or time; a hot oven and only long enough to colour is what is wanted. The contents are already hot, so a long bake only dries the fish.
- TimingThe half hour quoted covers picking the fish, heating it in the sauce and browning. Actual cooking time is a few minutes at each stage.
Turbot was the grandest fish on a Victorian table, poached whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle and sent up with lobster or shrimp sauce. Its expense is exactly why Mrs Beeton's book carries a run of recipes for the remains of cold turbot, of which this gratin is the plainest: flesh picked from the carcass, bound with sauce, crumbed and glazed. The pattern belongs to the wider nineteenth-century English kitchen habit of the rechauffe, the respectable second appearance of an expensive joint or fish, and it was borrowed from French practice along with the sauce names. Wild turbot from the North Sea and the Channel is now scarce and costly; most of what is sold today is farmed, and a good gratin can be made from any firm white fish left over from a poached dinner.