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Whiting aux Fines Herbes
INGREDIENTS. - Whiting, 1 bunch of sweet herbs, chopped very fine; butter. AVERAGE COST, 4d. to 6d. each.
Clean and skin the fish, fasten the tails in the mouths, and lay them in a bakingdish. Mince the herbs very fine, strew them over the fish, and place small pieces of butter over; cover with another dish, and let them simmer in a Dutch oven for 1/4 hour or 20 minutes. Turn the fish once or twice, and serve with the sauce poured over.
TIME.- hour or 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE all the year, but best from October to March.
A whole-fish dish of the plainest kind: whiting, chopped herbs, butter, and a covered dish. The quantities are left to the cook, so the judgement is all in the seasoning and the heat.
- The Dutch ovenHere this means the open-fronted tin reflector set before a coal fire, not a lidded cast-iron pot. The nearest modern equivalent is a covered baking dish in a moderate oven at 350F, which will cook two or three whiting through in about 20 minutes.
- The stated timeThe printed time has lost its fraction; a quarter of an hour to 20 minutes is most likely what is meant, and that suits ordinary whole whiting. The fish is done when the flesh at the thickest part of the back lifts cleanly from the bone.
- Tails in the mouthsCurling the fish and pushing the tail into the mouth was standard presentation for whiting, secured if need be with a small skewer. It is decorative only; the fish cooks perfectly well laid straight.
- Sweet herbsIn Beeton this normally means parsley with thyme and a little marjoram, sometimes a bay leaf. For one bunch, read roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons chopped once the coarse stalks are out.
- ButterNo amount is given. About 1 oz per fish, in small flakes over the herbs, is enough to baste the flesh and give the buttery herb liquor that is poured back over at the table. That liquor is the "sauce" referred to; there is no separate one.
- SkinningThe recipe expects the cook to skin the fish, and skinning a whole round fish neatly is fiddly work. Buying it filleted and rolling the fillets around the herbs gives much the same dish in less time.
- SubstitutesWhiting is soft-fleshed and mild; hake, pollock or small haddock behave much the same under a lid. Avoid anything oily, which overwhelms the herbs.
- YieldReckon one whiting per person, with potatoes and a wedge of lemon. Doubling is only a matter of dish size, so long as the fish lie in a single layer.
Whiting was the cheap, everyday sea fish of Victorian Britain, landed in quantity around the coasts and sold for a few pence apiece, as the note on average cost confirms. Its pale, delicate flesh made it standard invalid and nursery food, and cookery writers of the period recommended it precisely because it was easy to digest and quick to cook. Aux fines herbes is borrowed from French practice, where the phrase covers a mixture of soft green herbs, though English kitchens read it loosely as whatever the "sweet herbs" of the garden supplied. The seasonal note is a real one: whiting spawn in spring and are in poorest condition afterwards, so the autumn-to-late-winter window given here reflects when the fish were firmest and best value.