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Fish Turbot (Five pounds of white fish)
Five pounds of white fish boiled and cooled; one-half of a bunch of thyme; one-third of a bunch of green parsley; two small onions; two eggs; one-quarter of a pound of sifted flour; one-quarter of a pound of butter; one quart of milk. Leave a little milk to set flour, and boil the rest, eggs and all (adding pepper and salt), until it thickens, then put layer of fish and of dressing until the dish is full, then put bread crumbs over the top; lastly grated cheese. Bake half an hour.
A layered fish gratin under a thick egg-enriched white sauce — a nineteenth-century American stand-in for true turbot. The original assumes you know how to make a béchamel and never gives an oven temperature.
- The hinge: don't scramble the sauceBoiling milk with two whole eggs in it will curdle unless you work carefully. Make the sauce first — butter and flour cooked together, the milk whisked in, thickened — then beat the eggs with a little cold milk and stir that in off the heat, returning it to low heat just until it thickens further. Note that the original reserves its "little milk" to slake the flour and simply directs you to boil the rest "eggs and all."
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A half-hour bake for an already-cooked dish that only needs heating through and browning wants 375F. The crumb and cheese topping should be brown and the sauce bubbling at the edges.
- Weights of flour and butterA quarter pound of sifted flour is roughly one cup; a quarter pound of butter is one standard US stick. That is a very high proportion of fat and flour to one quart of milk, and deliberately so — the sauce is meant to set firm enough to hold the layers when cut.
- "A bunch" of herbsGenuinely imprecise. Treat it as about two tablespoons of chopped thyme leaves and a generous quarter cup of chopped parsley, and note the recipe never says when to add them — stir the herbs and the finely chopped onion into the sauce.
- The onionsTwo small onions raw in the layers will still be crunchy after thirty minutes. Chop them fine and sweat them in the butter before adding the flour.
- The fishThe recipe does not say whether five pounds is the weight as bought or after cooking and boning. Boil, cool, then skin, bone and flake it; if you start with whole fish expect a good deal less usable flesh than the stated weight. Cod, haddock, pollock or Great Lakes whitefish all suit.
- Dish and yieldThis fills a large deep casserole — roughly three to four quarts, depending on how much flaked fish you end up with — and will serve something like eight to ten as a main course. Build it fish, sauce, fish, sauce, ending with sauce so the crumbs have something to sit on.
True turbot is a European flatfish that rarely reached American kitchens in the nineteenth century, so cooks borrowed the name for a dish that imitated its effect: firm white flesh under a thick cream sauce, browned in the oven. Recipes titled "turbot à la crème" or simply "fish turbot" turn up repeatedly in American community and household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually specifying whatever local white fish was cheap — Great Lakes whitefish in the Midwest, cod or haddock on the coast. The construction is essentially a gratin, and its appeal was practical: it stretched leftover boiled fish, it could be assembled ahead, and the heavy roux-based sauce made a modest amount of fish feed a table. The dish is typically finished with bread crumbs and grated cheese.