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Fish Turbot (Four pounds of white fish)
Four pounds of white fish boiled twenty minutes, pick carefully from skin and bones. Dressing, one-half pint of milk, one tablespoonful of minced onion, one tablespoonful of thyme, one-half cupful of butter, two tablespoonfuls of flour. Rub butter and flour together, put in a double boiler and cook a few minutes, have ready one egg beaten with a tablespoonful of water and stir in with dressing. Alternate fish with dressing, sprinkle cracker or bread crumbs and bits of buttter on top and bake lightly.
A scalloped fish casserole of the sort Midwestern books called "turbot" whether or not any turbot was involved. The method is sound; the proportions need a little judgment.
- Don't boil the fish twenty minutesFour pounds of fish poached that long will shred to cotton. Bring salted water barely to a simmer and cook until the flesh just flakes, roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness, then lift out and pick over. The fish gets a second cooking in the oven.
- Half a pint of milk is one cupWith two tablespoons of flour that gives a thin-to-medium sauce, which is what you want against four pounds of dry flaked fish. If it seems scant, a cup and a half of milk with three tablespoons of flour covers the dish better.
- The butter is out of proportionHalf a cup of butter to two tablespoons of flour will not emulsify into a stable sauce; it breaks and pools. Use two tablespoons of butter for the roux and save the rest for dotting the top, or accept a deliberately buttery, slightly separated sauce.
- Temper the eggBeat the egg with its tablespoon of water, stir a ladle of hot sauce into the egg first, then return the whole to the double boiler off direct heat. Added straight to hot sauce it scrambles into threads.
- A tablespoon of thymeRead this as fresh leaves, stripped and chopped. A full tablespoon of dried thyme would dominate everything; a teaspoon of dried is the equivalent.
- "Bake lightly"Take this as a moderate oven, around 350F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are gold. Nothing in the dish is raw, so you are only heating through and browning the top.
- AssemblyButter a two- to three-quart dish and build in layers, fish then sauce, ending with sauce so the top layer of fish does not dry. Crumbs and butter last.
- YieldFour pounds of fish makes a large casserole, eight to ten generous servings. It reheats well.
"Fish turbot" in American cookbooks of this era rarely means turbot, the flatfish of the North Sea, which few inland households could buy. It was a borrowed name for a baked, sauced whitefish dish dressed up to sound like something from a French menu, and in the Great Lakes states the white fish called for may well have been lake whitefish, then abundant and cheap. The technique -- flaked cooked fish layered with a milk sauce, crumbed and browned -- is the standard nineteenth-century way of stretching a large piece of fish or using yesterday's boiled remainder, and it is the same logic that produced scalloped oysters and creamed salmon.