No. 1307

English Turbot with Caper Sauce

Turbot Anglais Sauce aux Capres

Select a very fresh turbot with thick and white meat, scale and draw, then soak it for one hour in cold water containing a quarter as much milk. Lay it on the drainer of a fish kettle with some salt, and moisten with fresh water mixed with white wine or vinegar; let boil very slowly for three-quarters of an hour. Drain the turbot, rub the white surface with a piece of butter and dress, surrounding it with branches of parsley and balls of boiled potatoes three quarters of an inch in diameter. Serve separately a white sauce (No. 562); finished just when ready to serve with a piece of fresh butter and capers, or else serve a mussel sauce instead of caper (No. 506).

← No. 1306 Canadian Turbot a la Mercier Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1308 Weakfish a la Brighton →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a whole turbot of eight pounds or more, a fish kettle to hold it, and a kitchen with a second cook stationed at the sauce. Both can be scaled down, but the timing is the part to ignore.

The hinge: forty-five minutes is far too longA whole turbot poaches at roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder, taken off the heat at 130-135F at the bone. Three-quarters of an hour applies only to a very large flat fish in a court bouillon that never rises above a shiver; at any real boil the flakes shred and the gelatinous skirt dissolves.
"Let boil very slowly" means do not boilBring the liquid to about 175F and hold it there. Visible rolling boil breaks up the flesh and clouds the poaching liquid, which you may want later for the sauce.
Sourcing turbotTrue European turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) is farmed and sold mostly in Europe; in North America it arrives as expensive whole fish, and the "turbot" on many fish counters is Greenland halibut or arrowtooth flounder. Large brill, halibut steaks, or a thick whole flounder behave similarly, though none has turbot's firmness.
The milk soakCold water with a quarter part milk for an hour whitens the flesh and pulls out blood from the cut side. It is optional with a very fresh farmed fish; thirty minutes is plenty.
Fish kettle and drainerThe perforated drainer is what lets you lift a whole cooked fish out intact. Without one, line a roasting pan with a doubled sheet of cheesecloth long enough to use as slings, or poach fillets and skip the presentation.
Wine or vinegar in the waterAcid firms the surface protein and keeps the white side white. A cup of dry white wine or a few tablespoons of white wine vinegar per gallon is the right order of magnitude; the original gives no ratio.
The sauces by numberThe recipe sends the reader to No. 562 for the white sauce and No. 506 for the mussel sauce; neither preparation is given on this page. Add the capers and the final knob of raw butter only after the pan leaves the heat, as the recipe's "finished just when ready to serve" implies, or the butter breaks.
Potato ballsThe recipe calls for three-quarter-inch balls of boiled potato; a parisienne scoop on peeled boiling potatoes is the easiest modern way to get them, cooked separately in salted water until just tender. Modern equivalent: small new potatoes, trimmed if you want the shape.
YieldThe original specifies no size. A whole 6-8 lb turbot would serve roughly eight to ten as a course; figure 6-8 oz of trimmed fish per person if working with fillets or steaks.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean in 1894 out of more than thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and the label Turbot Anglais is doing real work here: boiled turbot with a plain butter-and-caper sauce was the standard English treatment of the fish, set against the elaborately garnished French preparations that fill the surrounding pages. Turbot was the prestige flatfish of nineteenth-century European kitchens, prized for firm white flesh and a gelatinous skirt, and reaching an American kitchen it would have been an expensive import; Ranhofer's insistence on "very fresh" and "thick and white meat" is his own, and he does not say why. The diamond-shaped turbot kettle was made expressly for this fish. The two-sauce option is characteristic of the book: entries routinely cross-reference a numbered sauce, so a cook could work the repertoire from one volume rather than memorising it.