Turbot à La Normande

Amid all the heavy holiday dishes--turkey and dressing, prime rib and roasted potatoes, multiple desserts, &c.-- I wanted to slip in some fish. I've been searching through some old cookbooks and found this in Elizabeth's David's French Provincial Cooking (1960).

Ms. David calls this dish Sole en Matelote à la Normande. A matelote is a hornpipe, but thankfully we're not using a literal translation. In this case, she means a fish served in a light sauce (often the same sauce in which the fish is poached) of wine with onions and herbs; the term comes from the word matelot, or sailor. So, after all of that, we're making fish in a light sauce of wine and herbs (with mussels). This is more or less a two step process: 1. prepare the sauce and the vegetables; 2. prepare the fish.

Here's what you need to feed four:

--About a pound of fish. This works best with sole, of course. But sole isn't easy to find. So flounder will do nicely. You're looking for small, thin filets of a flaky white fish. For tonight's dinner, I could find neither sole nor flounder, so I was stuck with turbot. It's the correct consistency, but a but larger a fish, so a bit larger filets. 
--About a pound of mussels.
--An onion
--White wine (A true à la Normande would use cider.)
--Some herbs.
--A couple teaspoons of butter.
--Parsley butter -- you'll need parsley, butter and a lemon.
--Salt and pepper.

Step one.

Preheat the oven to about 350F. Take your butter out of the fridge; divide it into two, one-teaspoon pats. One will be for the onions. The other is for the parsley butter; set it aside and let it come to room temp. Slice the onion quite thin and sauté in a teaspoon of butter until it is translucent. Scrub the mussels and place them in a sauce pan with a glass of wine and some fresh herbs--thyme seems to work well--salt and pepper (I added some minced garlic). Steam until they open and remove immediately from the broth; save the broth, remove the mussels and discard the shells.

Step two.

Place the onions in a baking dish. Lay the filets atop the bed of onions, add salt and pepper. Through a sieve or a muslin, strain the broth over the fish. Cover the dish and put it the oven for about 20 minutes (longer for thicker filets, less for thinner...). 

Now, turn to the parsley butter. Chop a small bit (a teaspoon or two) of parsley as fine as you can. Put your room temp butter into a bowl and stir it (use a fork) until it is soft. Stir in the chopped parsley. (alternatively, you could melt the butter and stir in the parsley...) Once it's well mixed in, add a squeeze of lemon juice. Put the mix into the fridge and let it chill.

At the 20 minute mark, pull the fish out, uncover, add the parsley butter on top and spread the mussels around the edges. Leave uncovered and put it back into the oven for five minutes of so to melt the butter and warm up the mussels.

Once it's done, serve from the dish along side haricots vert amandine, a dry white wine (we enjoyed a Sancerre), and fresh baguette.

et voila. 

Chapeau: Elizabeth David. Her book as pictured above in the first edition and signed costs about $3,500.00. Luckily for the rest of us, it is available on Amazon and in cooking stores for around $20.00. The Penguin Classics edition is very good.