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Turbot
Take a whitefish; boil; take out the bones and sprinkle with salt and pepper. For the dressing use one pint of cream sauce prepared in the usual way, and when cool add two beaten eggs. Put in baking dish a layer of fish, then a layer of sauce, until full. Cover top with bread crumbs and bake in the cooker for one hour. Use two radiators.
A creamed baked fish under crumbs, written for a retained-heat cooker rather than an oven. The name refers to the style of dish, not the species — no turbot is involved.
- The hinge: heat the cooker properlyA fireless cooker generates no heat of its own; the "radiators" are heated discs (usually soapstone or iron, depending on the make) brought to a high heat on the range and set with the dish, commonly one below and one above. If they go in merely hot, the food sits for an hour at a temperature that cooks nothing and suits bacteria very well. If you are working in a conventional oven instead, a moderate oven -- around 350F -- for roughly 30 to 40 minutes will do it, until the centre is set and reads 160F.
- Whitefish, not turbotAmerican cookbooks of the period often gave creamed, layered fish dishes the name "turbot" whatever the fish, and Great Lakes whitefish was one of the fish used; halibut and haddock appear under the same title. Any firm white fish works: cod, haddock, halibut. Something in the region of 1½ to 2 lb, poached until just opaque, then flaked and picked over for bones.
- Cream sauce "in the usual way"One pint means a full 2 cups. Period proportions ran from about 2 to 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to the 2 cups of milk or thin cream, depending on how thick a sauce was wanted, seasoned with salt. It must be genuinely cool before the eggs go in, or they will scramble in the pan.
- The eggsTwo beaten eggs turn the sauce into a loose custard, which is what holds the layers together. Do not let the mixture boil once they are in.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs hold up better than fresh, and dotting them with butter helps them brown. In a fireless cooker there is little top heat, so expect the crust to stay pale and soft rather than browned.
- Assembly and yieldRoughly a 1½-quart dish, ending with sauce before the crumbs so the top layer of fish does not dry. Serves four to six as a main course with potatoes.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households from roughly 1905 into the 1920s: an insulated box, heated stone or iron discs, and food that finished cooking on stored heat while the stove went out. It was sold as economy — no fuel burned for an hour of baking — and as freedom, since the cook could leave the house. It belonged to the same domestic-science moment, which treated the kitchen as a system to be measured and improved. The title looks like a piece of culinary borrowing: turbot is a European flatfish that was not generally available on American tables, and "turbot" seems to have come to name the creamed, layered, crumb-topped treatment rather than the fish, with local white fish standing in for it.