Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [216]
Serves 6
6 pieces of turbot fillet
salt, pepper
turbot bones
175 g (6 oz) unsalted butter
375 g (12 oz) trimmed mushrooms, sliced, woodland mushrooms or cultivated or the two mixed
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
6 tablespoons crème fraîche (see recipe)
chopped parsley
seasoned flour
Season the turbot with salt and pepper. Use the bones to make a little fish stock*, with the usual aromatics: you will need about 250 ml (8 fl oz). Clarify half the butter.
Melt the rest of the butter in a sauté pan and cook the mushrooms with the garlic. If they are the cultivated kind, cover the pan to conserve the juice at the start. Moisten the mushrooms with a little of the stock as they cook, adding more as the liquid reduces. Add seasoning and keep tasting. Add cream gradually to taste – you may not need it all. The point is that different kinds of mushroom produce different quantities of liquid as they cook. This means adding more or less stock as you go. Be guided by taste rather than by precise measures. Use the cream to soften the effect. Aim to end up with a moist ragoût rather than a lot of liquid. Pour it on to the warm serving dish. Scatter lightly with parsley.
Start cooking the turbot when the mushrooms are nearly ready. Dry and flour the pieces and cook them to a nice golden colour in the clarified butter. Allow about 2 minutes a side, but be guided by their thickness. Arrange them on top of the mushrooms, and serve. If it is the season, new potatoes go well with this dish.
TWAITE SHAD see A FEW WORDS ABOUT… SHAD
WALLEYE see PERCH
WEEVER see A FEW WORDS ABOUT… WEEVER
† WHITEBAIT
One of the treats I best remember as a child was being taken by my mother – rather stealthily – to Lyons Corner House, at Piccadilly Circus, for the purpose of eating whitebait, with lemon and brown bread and butter. It was a dish of her nostalgic youth in London, when she was an art student. Now she lived in the north, and felt that my education was lacking in this essential experience, and must be remedied. At first I was alarmed at the crisp mound of minuscule bodies, complete with eyes, which were placed in front of me. Then I saw my mother tucking in with an impressive wave of her fork, and had to follow suit. I soon found out how right she had been. By the way she talked, I understood that whitebait was an inalienable right for Londoners, and at the time accepted her enthusiasm without enquiry. Only thirty years later, when whitebait began to appear quite frequently on pub menus outside London, did the story of this tiny fish and its enormous fame begin to reveal itself.
Whitebait is not, in fact, a separate species, but the small fry mainly of herrings and sprats. They used to be caught in shoals in the Thames off Blackwall and Greenwich, from the early spring to the end of August. As far as I can make out, the idea of whitebait dinners as a goal for excursions began with some enterprising restaurateur in Blackwall towards the end of the eighteenth century, but what gave these tiny fish their particular cachet was their appearance at the annual ministerial whitebait dinner held during most of the nineteenth century at Greenwich (I think the last one was held in 1894).
These dinners had their origin in a close political friendship. The MP for Dover, Robert Preston, a rich merchant of Scotland and Nova Scotia, had a cottage on the banks of Dagenham Reach, an idyllic sort of place. He was in the habit of inviting a friend of his, George Rose, commonly known as Old George Rose, down for the day near the end of the parliamentary session, some time towards the end of May. One year, Old George, then Secretary to the Treasury, asked