Whiting, Boiled
INGREDIENTS.- 1/4 lb. of salt to each gallon of water. Aver- AGE COST, 4d. to 8d. each.
Cleanse the fish, but do not skin them; lay them in a fish-kettle, with sufficient cold water to cover them and salt in the above proportion. Bring them gradually to a boil, and simmer gently for about 5 WHITING, FRIED. minutes, or rather more should the fish be very large. Dish them on a hot napkin, and garnish with tufts of parsley. Serve with anchovy or caper sauce, and plain melted butter.
TIME. After the water boils, 5 minutes.
SEASONABLE all the year, but best from October to March.
A plain poach for a delicate fish, written when whiting was cheap and sold whole. The whole method hinges on never letting the water reach a real boil once the fish is in.
- The salt ratioA quarter pound of salt to the imperial gallon is about 113 g to 4.5 litres, roughly a 2.5 per cent brine — somewhat weaker than seawater. Scale it to whatever pan you use rather than salting by eye; it seasons the flesh and helps it hold together.
- "Bring gradually to a boil, and simmer gently"The pan is brought up to the boil and the five minutes counted from there, but held at a gentle simmer thereafter. Keep it off a rolling boil: whiting is soft-fleshed and hard boiling will shred the belly and pull the flakes apart before the centre is done.
- Fish kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lifting plate. A deep roasting tin on the hob or a wide sauté pan works; lay the fish on a strip of folded parchment or muslin with long ends so you can lift it out intact.
- Five minutes is rightFor a whiting of ordinary market size five minutes is genuinely enough — test at the thickest point beside the backbone, where the flesh should just release from the bone. Longer and it goes cottony. The recipe says only 'rather more' for very large fish.
- "Do not skin them"Worth obeying. Victorian cooks routinely skinned whiting for frying and curling; here the skin is what keeps the fish whole in the water. Have the fishmonger gut and trim but leave the skin on.
- What to buyEuropean whiting is a small member of the cod family. In North America "whiting" usually means silver hake, which behaves much the same; hake, pollock or small haddock are all fair substitutes.
- The hot napkinA folded linen cloth laid on the warmed serving dish, there to soak up the water that drains off a poached fish. A clean tea towel does the job, or simply drain the fish well and serve on a warm plate.
- The saucesAnchovy and caper sauce in Beeton are both built on a flour-and-butter white sauce, not vinaigrettes; the "plain melted butter" of the period is likewise a lightly thickened butter sauce rather than butter simply melted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or accompaniment; one whiting per person is the natural serving. The costing of 4d to 8d each marks it as an everyday fish rather than a company dish.
Whiting occupied a particular niche in nineteenth-century English cookery: cheap, abundant on the east and south coasts, and above all easy to digest, which is why it turns up constantly in Victorian invalid and children's cookery alongside sole. Its flesh is soft and low in fat, so it was treated gently — poached in salted water, or skinned, curled tail-into-mouth and fried. The note that the fish is "best from October to March" fits the spawning cycle: whiting spawn from winter through spring and are in poorer condition afterwards, so the colder months gave the firmer fish. The instruction to bring the water up cold and slowly, rather than plunging the fish into boiling water, is a common Victorian rule for whole fish and is echoed in modern court-bouillon poaching.