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Small Flounder, Sur Le Plat
Peel off skin on both sides of three small flounders of a pound each and make an incision from head to tail on thick side of each fish. Then with a knife lift up filets from bone of each fish without separating from the bodies. Knead in a bowl one ounce butter, half teaspoon extract of beef, three finely chopped shallots, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and juice of half a lemon. Evenly divide this under the filets of each fish, well spread over. Place on a lightly buttered baking dish, pour one gill white wine around fish. Sprinkle three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs over. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then set to bake in oven forty-five minutes. Remove and send to table in same dish.
A whole-fish preparation cooked and served in the same buttered dish. Two things in the original need adjusting before it works: the oven is never named, and the timing belongs to a much larger fish.
- The timing is the hingeForty-five minutes will reduce a one-pound flounder to dry threads. Whole flat fish of that size are done in 18-25 minutes in a hot oven, when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point.
- No oven temperature givenBooks of this period assumed the cook knew. For a shallow gratin dish with wine in it, 400-425F is right; the wine should be bubbling around the fish and the crumbs browning by the end.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. In a dish holding three fish it makes only a shallow film, enough to keep the underside moist and to combine with the butter and fish juices, not to poach.
- Extract of beefA concentrated meat paste, sold then as Liebig's or Bovril. A half teaspoon of any modern beef base or demi-glace concentrate does the same job; it is there for savour and colour in the butter, not for beefiness.
- Lifting the filletsCut down the lateral line to the bone on the dark side, then work the knife flat under each fillet toward the fin, leaving them hinged at the edges. The seasoned butter goes into those two pockets and bastes the fish from the inside as it melts.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for three small fish is heavy by current taste, particularly the pepper. Season the flesh under the fillets and the surface lightly, and taste the pan juices at the table.
- CrumbsFresh crumbs on a wet dish go soggy unless they get direct heat. Scatter them over the fish only, not into the wine, and finish under the broiler for a minute if they have not coloured.
- YieldThree fish, three servings, each in its own portion of the baking dish. The dish goes to the table, so use something presentable and shallow.
Sur le plat means simply "on the dish" -- cooked in the vessel it is served from, a formula that in French kitchens covers everything from baked eggs to this kind of gratin of fish. The economy is practical as much as culinary: the butter, wine and fish juices reduce together into a sauce that would be lost if the fish were moved. Flounder and sole were common choices for such treatments, being flat enough to cook through quickly and firm enough to be lifted off the bone while raw. The seasoned butter here -- shallot, parsley, lemon, a trace of meat extract -- is a close cousin of the compound butters of professional French practice, and the meat extract is at least consistent with a recipe of this vintage: commercial beef concentrates were a common larder item from the later nineteenth century onward and appear often in books of this kind as a shortcut to depth of flavour.