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Turbot Mornay, with Fines Herbes
Procure a three-pound piece of tail part of a fresh turbot. Lift up filets, place in sautoire with a half ounce butter, half gill white wine, gill water, two branches parsley, the juice of a quarter lemon, a level teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover fish with a buttered paper, cook on fire for five minutes, then set in oven for twenty minutes, remove and keep hot. Finely chop two well-cleaned, fresh mushrooms and six shallots, place in sautoire with a tablespoon butter and cook for five minutes, tossing well meanwhile. Add a finely chopped truffle, half teaspoon finely chopped each parsley and chives and shuffle pan well.
Prepare Mornay sauce, pour one-third of the sauce in bottom of baking dish, place fish over, cut side up, evenly sprinkle the fine herbs and pour balance of sauce over fish, dredge a little grated Parmesan cheese over all, set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and serve.
A Delmonico-style gratin of poached flatfish under Mornay sauce. Two things need attention before you start: the sauce is assumed rather than given, and the fish is cooked twice, which by modern standards is once too many.
- Mornay sauce is not in the recipeYou are expected to know it: a white sauce (butter, flour, milk) finished off the heat with grated Gruyere and Parmesan, and often an egg yolk. Make about 2 cups for a 3 lb piece of fish, and keep it loose enough to pour, as it thickens again in the oven.
- The hinge: cook the fish lessFive minutes on the stove plus twenty in the oven plus fifteen more under sauce will take turbot well past done. Poach the fillets gently until barely set, 8 to 10 minutes total for thick pieces, then sauce and give the dish only long enough to glaze, 8 to 10 minutes at 400F or a couple of minutes under the broiler.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of wine is 4 tablespoons and a gill of water is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making three saltspoons of pepper roughly 3/4 teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as coal ranges did not offer one. A moderate oven, 350F, suits the poaching stage; raise it to 400F or use the broiler for the final gratin so the Parmesan colors before the fish dries.
- Sautoire and buttered paperA sautoire is a straight-sided saute pan; any wide, shallow pan that fits the fillets in one layer will do. The buttered paper is a cartouche, a round of parchment laid directly on the fish to hold in steam, and it still works better than foil.
- TurbotGenuine turbot is a European flatfish and expensive where it can be found at all. Halibut, brill, or thick fillets of sole or fluke behave the same way. A 3 lb tail piece yields four to six servings.
- Six shallots is a lotSix modern shallots would overwhelm the dish, and period shallots were generally smaller than what is sold now. Two or three, finely chopped, gives the intended background sweetness.
- TruffleOptional without much loss. The recipe adds it at the very end of the mushroom-shallot cooking, so it perfumes the mixture rather than cooking away; truffle oil is not a substitute in a baked gratin.
- SaltA level teaspoon in the poaching liquid, plus a cheese sauce and grated Parmesan on top, adds up quickly. Salt the fish lightly and season the Mornay at the end, after the cheese has gone in.
Mornay sauce is bechamel enriched with cheese, and its name is generally traced to the 19th-century Paris restaurant world rather than to any documented inventor, with the Marquis de Mornay and the Duc de Morny both offered as candidates by later writers. Fines herbes in classical French usage means the fine chopped quartet of parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon, though here the phrase covers a mushroom-shallot-truffle mixture closer to a dry duxelles. Turbot itself was the aristocrat of European flatfish, sold by the piece and prized for its firm gelatinous flesh, and the tail was a favoured cut. The recipe's shape, poach the fish, build a garnish, nap with sauce, glaze with Parmesan, is the gratin technique of the classical French professional kitchen, and its presence in an American book of this sort reflects how thoroughly Delmonico's and its imitators had transplanted that repertoire to New York.