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Turbot, Baked Fillets of
INGREDIENTS.-The remains of cold turbot, lobster sauce left from the preceding day, egg and bread-crumbs; cayenne and salt to taste; minced parsley, nutmeg, lemonjuice.
After having cleared the fish from all skin and bone, divide it into square pieces of an equal size; brush them over with egg, sprinkle with bread-crumbs mixed with a little minced parsley and seasoning.
Lay the fillets in a baking-dish, with sufficient butter to baste with. Bake for 1/4 hour, and do not forget to keep them well moistened with the butter. Put a little lemon-juice and grated nutmeg to the cold lobster sauce; make it hot, and pour over the fish, which must be well drained from the butter. Garnish with parsley and cut lemon.
TIME.-Altogether, hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. Cold turbot thus warmed in the remains of lobster sauce will be found much nicer than putting the fish again in water.
A second-day dish built on the assumption that yesterday's turbot and its lobster sauce are both sitting in the larder. The whole point is that the fish is reheated in fat and sauce rather than water, so the crumb coat and the basting are what carry it.
- Oven heatBeeton gives no temperature and no oven description at all. Since the fish is already cooked, you are only crisping the crumb and heating through, so a moderate heat is enough for the quarter-hour bake. No piece size is specified beyond "square pieces of an equal size".
- The hinge: basting"Do not forget to keep them well moistened with the butter" is the instruction that decides the dish. Cooked turbot has already lost most of its moisture once; without repeated basting the crumb burns and the flesh goes to cotton wool. Baste every four or five minutes, then drain the fillets properly before saucing or the lobster sauce will split into a butter slick.
- Turbot and substitutesWild turbot is now expensive and largely a restaurant fish; farmed turbot is available but pricey. Brill, halibut and thick cod or hake fillets all behave the same way as cold cooked leftovers.
- Lobster sauceIn Beeton this is a butter or bechamel sauce enriched with pounded lobster coral and chopped lobster meat, sharpened with cayenne. If you have no leftover sauce, a plain white sauce with lobster or crab meat, a pinch of cayenne and the lemon and nutmeg specified here stands in.
- Reheating leftoversCold cooked fish and a dairy-based shellfish sauce should have been refrigerated promptly and used within a day or two, as the recipe assumes. Bring the sauce to a full simmer rather than merely warming it, and serve the fish hot straight from the oven.
- SeasoningGrated whole nutmeg and cayenne in a fish sauce read as very Victorian but work; use nutmeg sparingly, a few strokes on a fine grater for a cupful of sauce. The lemon juice goes into the sauce, not onto the fish, so the crumb stays dry.
- The garbled timeThe "TIME.-Altogether, hour" line has plainly lost its fraction in printing; the total is meant to cover cleaning and cutting the fish, crumbing it and the quarter-hour bake, but the missing figure cannot be recovered from this text.
- YieldNot stated, as it depends on what is left. The remains of a fish that fed six will fill a small baking dish and serve three or four as a light main course with potatoes.
Beeton's household economy runs on the second appearance of an expensive fish. Turbot was the grandest thing on a Victorian fish course, poached whole in a diamond-shaped turbot kettle and sent to table with lobster sauce, and a whole one was far too costly to let go to waste. Hence the note at the end, which is really the argument of the entry: rewarming fish in water leaches out what flavour survived the first cooking, while crumbing and basting it in butter gives a fresh surface and a reason to bring it back. The pairing of turbot with lobster sauce was fixed English practice by the middle of the nineteenth century, and the sauce is seasoned with cayenne and nutmeg.