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Turbot with Black Butter
Remove the skin and bones from some cold cooked turbot and cut the fish into nice sized pieces. Put a large piece of butter into a stewpan and boil it until it comes to be of a dark color; then put in a moderate quantity of finely-chopped parsley and one wineglassful of tarragon vinegar. Season to taste with pepper and salt. Put the fish into the sauce and keep it at the side of the fire until heated through and through. Turn the fish with the butter on to a hot dish and serve.
Vol-au-Vent of Fish, Normandy Prepare a puff paste with one pound each of flour and butter and one ounce of salt. Roll the paste out to a thickness of about three-fourths of an inch, and cut it round to the size of the dish on which it is to be served. Place the flat of paste on a baking sheet, brush it over with beaten egg, and cut a circle through the middle about one-fourth of an inch deep, leaving an edge about one inch wide all round. Bake the paste in a moderate oven, and when cooked lift up the center piece which will have risen; scoop out the uncooked paste, brush the inside with beaten egg, and place it in an oven for five minutes longer. Prepare a filling of scalloped fillets of soles, mussels, oysters and sliced mushrooms. Mix the cooking liquor of the mussels with some lean veloute sauce, boil it until somewhat reduced, then thicken it with the beaten yolks of two eggs. Mix the sauce with the garnishing, place the cover of paste on, stand it on the dish it was made to fit, and serve.
Two dishes run together on this page: a quick reheat of leftover turbot in browned butter, and a full vol-au-vent with a Normandy garnish. Both assume a cook who already knows puff paste and velouté.
- Black butter is not burnt butterBeurre noir is butter taken past the hazelnut stage of beurre noisette to a dark brown, with the milk solids toasted and fragrant, but stopped short of burning. Past that point it turns acrid and grey, and there is no recovering it. Take the pan off the heat a shade before the color you want, since it keeps darkening.
- The vinegar goes in off the heatA wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Adding that much cold acid to boiling butter will spatter violently; slide the pan off the flame first, then add the parsley and vinegar together.
- "The side of the fire"On a coal range this was the cooler edge of the top plate. Use the lowest burner setting or a pan of barely simmering water. The fish is already cooked and only needs warming; boiling it in the butter will shred it.
- TurbotTrue North Atlantic turbot is expensive and often farmed now. Halibut, brill or any firm cold cooked white flatfish behaves the same way. This is fundamentally a leftovers dish and works with whatever poached fish you have.
- Puff paste proportionsEqual weights of flour and butter gives a very rich paste, standard for the period. The ounce of salt is by weight for the full pound of flour, roughly two tablespoons of table salt, and is heavy by modern taste; a teaspoon or two is plenty, especially with salted butter.
- Oven for the vol-au-ventThe recipe says only "moderate" and gives no temperature; moderate is generally read today as around 350F. Puff paste of that thickness needs a hot start to lift, 425F for the first fifteen minutes or so, dropping to 350F to dry the interior through. The five-minute return after scooping is just to set the egg wash and crisp the base.
- The egg liaison must not boilOnce the reduced velouté and mussel liquor are thickened with the yolks, keep it below a simmer. Boiling will curdle the yolks and leave grainy threads through the sauce. This is the hinge of the second recipe.
- Shellfish timingSteam the mussels only until they open and shuck the oysters raw, adding both to the sauce at the very end. Oysters held in hot sauce for more than a couple of minutes go rubbery and weep liquid into the filling.
- YieldThe vol-au-vent as described is a single large case cut to fit whatever dish it is served on and portioned at table, so the size of that dish decides how many it feeds. The turbot dish serves two to three from the remains of a fish.
Black butter belongs to the plainest end of French professional cookery: butter cooked dark, sharpened with vinegar, thrown over skate, turbot or brains. It appears here in its most economical form, as a way to make yesterday's poached turbot presentable, which is exactly the sort of thing a hotel kitchen the size of the Waldorf's needed constantly. The vol-au-vent beside it is the opposite kind of dish. The name means something like "flight in the wind," for the lightness of the raised case, and its invention is traditionally credited to Carême in the early nineteenth century, though the attribution is a kitchen commonplace rather than a documented fact. "Normandy" signals the garnish rather than any regional method: mussels, oysters, mushrooms and sole in a cream-enriched sauce, the standard shorthand for the shellfish of the Channel coast. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled this book in 1896 from the kitchen's working repertoire, which is why an unglamorous leftovers dish sits on the same page as a centerpiece.