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Boiled Turbot with Lobster Sauce
Place a turbot in a fish kettle with a bunch of parsley, a lump of salt, plenty of cold water and the juice of two large lemons. When the water begins to boil move the kettle to the side of the fire and let it simmer until the fish is tender. Have prepared the following sauce: Pick the meat from a hen lobster and cut it into moderate-sized pieces; place the shell and spawn in a mortar with a lump of butter and pound it until smooth, then pass it through a fine hair sieve. Make three-fourths of a pint of butter sauce, put the pieces of lobster in it, and season it with a very small quantity of cayenne pepper. When the sauce boils stir in the pounded mixture and one teacupful of cream, and move the pan to the edge of the fire. When the turbot is cooked drain it well, lay it on a hot dish over which has been spread a folded napkin, place a border of fresh green parsley round the dish and then a circle of quarters of lemon. Serve the fish while hot with the sauce in a sauceboat. The fish does not require much boiling.
A late-Victorian dining-room standard, written for a kitchen with a coal range and a fish kettle. Almost everything translates, but the timings and the sauce need reading closely.
- The hinge: do not boil the fish"Move the kettle to the side of the fire" means drop the water to a bare shiver, around 175-180F, the moment it comes up. Turbot held at a rolling boil sheds its skin, curls at the fins and turns cottony; the closing line, "the fish does not require much boiling," is the real instruction.
- TimingGo by the fish rather than the clock: it is done when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point, and it will carry on cooking as it drains. Test early; the closing line warns that little cooking is needed.
- Fish kettleA long oval pan with a perforated lift-out plate. A deep roasting pan works for steaks or a small fish, and a rack or a doubled sling of cheesecloth spares you a broken fish on the way out. "A lump of salt" is unquantified; salt the water to taste.
- Turbot and substitutesEuropean turbot is farmed and imported, and expensive; wild fish is scarce in North American markets. Halibut, brill or a thick fluke fillet behave the same way in a simmering court bouillon.
- "Butter sauce"In 1896 this means English drawn butter — a white roux thinned with fish stock or water and finished with butter — not a beurre blanc and not melted butter. Three-fourths of a pint is about 1 1/2 cups; a teacupful of cream is roughly 5-6 fl oz.
- Hen lobster and spawnThe recipe wants a female for her coral, the dark roe that turns scarlet on cooking and both colours and thickens the sauce. Live hen lobsters are sold at good fishmongers but the coral is a lottery; if you get none, pound the shells with the butter anyway for the flavour and accept a paler sauce.
- Mortar and hair sievePound the shells with softened butter, or pulse them in a food processor, then press the paste through a fine-mesh strainer or a chinois. Cool the strained lobster butter and lift off any grit that settles. Stir it into the sauce off the heat — once the shell butter goes in, boiling will split it.
- Cayenne"A very small quantity" is right: an eighth of a teaspoon in this volume. It is there to sharpen the lobster, not to be tasted as heat.
- Serving and yieldThe folded napkin under the fish soaks up drainage so the platter does not flood; a hot platter and a warmed sauceboat matter more than the parsley border. A 4-5 lb turbot with this quantity of sauce serves six as a middle course.
Boiled turbot with lobster sauce was one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century English formal dining -- it appears in Eliza Acton and in Mrs. Beeton, and it crossed to American hotel menus as a mark of a serious fish course. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was compiling a working reference for a hotel that fed New York society, and the plainness of the writing here is the point: the dish sold itself on the quality of the fish and the richness of the sauce, not on any trick of technique. Turbot was not a local fish and would have been costly in New York, which is part of why it earned a place on the card. The lobster butter -- shells and coral pounded with butter and forced through a sieve -- is the same procedure that survives in professional kitchens today as beurre de homard, and it is an economical way of getting every bit of flavour out of a shell that would otherwise be thrown away.