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Boiled Flounders
Clean and wash a flounder, make a sharp cut nearly to the bone down the back, put it into a fishkettle with sufficient water to cover, add half an ounce of saltpetre and four ounces of salt to every gallon of water and simmer gently on the side of the fire for six minutes or longer, according to the size of the fish, taking care that it does not break. Take it out carefully, spread on a napkin and serve with a sauceboatful of melted butter.
The dish is simple poached flatfish, but the poaching liquid as given is not something to reproduce. The problem is the saltpetre.
- The saltpetre is the sticking pointHalf an ounce of potassium nitrate to a gallon of water works out to roughly 3,500-4,000 parts per million in the poaching liquid, with no measured control over how much the fish takes up. Nitrate and nitrite additions in modern food practice are held to tightly specified levels for good reason, and there is no way to bring an open kettle of salted water into that range by eye. Use a current recipe for poached flounder instead.
- Why it is there at allSaltpetre was added to fish-boiling water to firm the flesh and keep it looking white and bright rather than grey. It is a cosmetic and textural trick, not a flavour ingredient, and nothing is lost from the dish by its absence.
- FishkettleA long, narrow covered pan with a perforated lifting trivet, made so a whole fish could be raised out in one piece. The trivet is the whole point of the vessel: flounder falls apart the moment you try to lift it with a spatula.
- "Simmer gently on the side of the fire"On a coal range the centre of the top plate was hottest and the sides cooler. The instruction means the barest quiver, well below a rolling boil, which is correct for any flatfish.
- The cut down the backScoring nearly to the bone along the spine lets heat reach the thickest part and keeps the skin from splitting elsewhere as the flesh contracts. It is the one piece of technique in the recipe worth keeping.
- Melted butterIn kitchens of this period "melted butter" usually meant a thin flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain clarified butter.
- Four ounces of salt to the gallonAbout 3 percent salinity, close to seawater. That part is ordinary for poaching fish.
Boiled flounder belongs to the plainest end of the nineteenth-century hotel repertoire: a whole flatfish poached, drained on a folded napkin, and sent out with a sauceboat, the same treatment given to turbot and sole in English kitchens for a century before Oscar Tschirky wrote it down for the Waldorf. The napkin is not decoration but drainage. Saltpetre in the fish kettle appears in some of the period's household manuals, alongside vinegar or milk for the same whitening purpose, and it reflects an era when a compound sold as a preserving and curing salt was simply another item on the kitchen shelf rather than a regulated additive. That change in how nitrates are handled, more than any change in taste, is what dates the recipe.