Chop some cooked trout and white fish, and mix with ½ cup of boiled rice. Season with salt, pepper and all kinds of herbs minced fine. Then make a rich pie-paste and roll out very thin. Fill with the mixture and make into a roll. Sprinkle with bits of butter and let bake until brown. Serve hot with wine-sauce.
A compressed, quantity-free version of the Russian fish pie known as kulebiaka. The proportions have to be reconstructed, but the method is sound and the result is good.
- Fill in the missing amountsBeyond the half cup of boiled rice the recipe names no quantities. As a starting point, about 12 oz (350 g) of flaked cooked fish to that rice gives a filling that holds together without being pasty, and a roll of that size takes roughly 1 lb of pastry. These proportions are reconstructed, not the book's.
- "Rich pie-paste"In books of this period the phrase usually means a short crust with a high proportion of butter or lard to flour rather than a puff paste, though some writers used it more loosely. All-butter shortcrust works; rolled thin, as instructed, it needs to be handled cold or it will tear under the weight of the filling.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F (200C) until the pastry is browned through, 35 to 45 minutes. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are baking the crust, not the filling.
- Seal and ventThe hinge of the dish. Roll the filling up seam-side down, pinch the ends closed, and cut two or three steam vents along the top. Without vents the trapped moisture from the fish lifts the pastry off the filling and the base goes sodden.
- Dry the fillingFlake the fish and let it cool completely, and use rice that is cooked dry rather than sticky. Warm or wet filling melts the butter in the pastry before it reaches the oven.
- "All kinds of herbs"Dill is the traditional choice here and carries the dish; parsley, chervil and a little tarragon suit it. Chopped hard-boiled egg and softened onion are standard in the fuller Russian versions and are worth adding.
- Wine-sauceFor fish this is most likely a savoury sauce rather than the sweet wine sauce period books give for puddings, though the recipe does not say. A velouté made with fish stock and dry white wine, finished with butter, suits it.
- YieldOne roll of this size cuts into four to six thick slices. Let it rest ten minutes before slicing or the filling slumps out of the cut end.
This is a shorthand version of kulebiaka (often anglicised as coulibiac), the tall Russian fish pie of salmon or sturgeon layered with rice or buckwheat, egg, onion and dill. Grand-restaurant versions in the French tradition are generally traced to Russian cooks working in Paris in the nineteenth century, and Escoffier's kitchen helped fix the dish in Western menus; the everyday Russian original is simply an enriched yeast-dough pie of whatever fish was to hand. What appears here is that everyday form, filtered through an American "dishes of all nations" calendar book, where each day offered a foreign dish in a few lines with no attempt at authenticity beyond the label. The instruction to use cooked trout and white fish keeps the work short.