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Baked Turbot
Clean and wash a small turbot, place it on a dish, pour over a small quantity of hot butter, sprinkle with a little finely-chopped parsley, powdered mace, salt and pepper, and allow it to remain for an hour. Lift the fish up carefully and place it in a baking dish. Brush it over with egg, then cover with sifted breadcrumbs, set it in the oven and bake. When done remove, put it on a dish and serve with any desired fish sauce.
A plain baked whole flatfish with a butter-and-herb marinade and a crumb crust. The original assumes a cook who knows what turbot looks like and how hot the range is, so both need filling in.
- The fish itselfTrue turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) is a North Atlantic flatfish, mostly farmed now and expensive where it is sold at all in the United States. A "small" or chicken turbot runs 2-3 lb whole; brill, halibut, fluke or a large sole take the treatment equally well.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because a coal range had none to give. Bake at 400F, which is hot enough to set the crumb coat before the flesh overcooks.
- TimingReckon roughly 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point; a whole 2-3 lb fish will take somewhere in the region of 20-30 minutes depending on its depth. Test by whether the flesh parts cleanly from the bone. Turbot is gelatinous and comparatively forgiving, but it will still go dry and cottony if pushed well past that point.
- The hour's marinatingMelted butter, parsley, mace, salt and pepper sit on the raw fish for an hour; in a period kitchen that hour would have passed somewhere cool rather than in a warm room. Do it in the refrigerator, and let the fish sit out 15 minutes before it goes in the oven so the butter loosens again.
- Powdered maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Ground mace loses its perfume fast; a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg is the closest substitute if the jar in the cupboard is old.
- Egg and crumbs"Brush it over with egg" means beaten egg, applied thinly. "Sifted breadcrumbs" are dry crumbs put through a sieve for evenness, not fresh soft crumbs; plain fine dry breadcrumbs are the modern equivalent. Dot the coated fish with a little more butter or it will bake pale.
- "Any desired fish sauce"The period repertoire of fish sauces ran to hollandaise, sauce Normande, shrimp or lobster sauce, and plain drawn butter with lemon; any of these suits. A whole 2-3 lb fish serves two to three.
Turbot was the grand fish of the European table, and its appearance in an American hotel book is a statement of ambition rather than a nod to local markets. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was cataloguing a repertoire built on French service, and turbot -- gelatinous, firm, faintly sweet -- was among the flatfish most prized by French cookery, alongside sole. In New York it arrived packed in ice from European waters or was quietly replaced with halibut, which American cookbooks of the period sometimes labelled "turbot" outright. The fish carried literary weight as well: the enormous turbot laid before the emperor Domitian in Juvenal's fourth satire was for centuries the standard joke about extravagance in fish, and to order one at the Waldorf was to order something with a pedigree. The recipe's simplicity -- butter, parsley, mace, crumbs -- is the point. A fish this good was not to be buried in sauce until it reached the plate.