Make a rich pie-dough; line a deep pie-dish with the paste and let bake. Then fill with chopped boiled fish, oysters, shrimps and some chopped mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt and paprica and the grated peel of a lemon. Pour over ¼ cup of melted butter and the juice of ½ lemon and a beaten egg. Then cover with the dough and let bake until done. Serve hot.
The recipe gives a method but almost no quantities, which was normal for a page-a-day book aimed at cooks who already knew how a fish pie went together. A deep 9-inch dish and the proportions below will fill it out.
- Quantities to fill a 9-inch deep dishAbout 1 lb cooked white fish (cod, haddock, pollock), 1 cup shucked oysters with their liquor drained off, 8 oz cooked peeled shrimp, and 4-6 oz mushrooms. That comes to something over 2 lb of filling, which the ¼ cup butter, half lemon and single egg have to season and bind.
- Blind bake properly"Line a deep pie-dish with the paste and let bake" means blind baking the bottom crust before filling. Line with parchment and weights at 400F for 15 minutes, remove the weights, and give it another 5-8 minutes until the base is dry and pale gold. Without weights the sides of a rich crust will slump into the dish.
- Oven temperatureFor the second bake, 375F for 25-30 minutes is enough to colour the lid and set the egg. The filling is already cooked, so this stage is about the pastry, not the fish.
- The oysters are the hingeOysters need about two minutes of heat; anything longer turns them to rubber. Fold them in raw and drained rather than pre-cooking them, and accept that even so they will be firm by the time the crust browns. If that bothers you, halve them.
- Cook the mushrooms firstThe recipe adds them chopped and raw. Raw mushrooms shed a great deal of water into a closed pie and will make the blind-baked base soggy. Sauté them dry in a hot pan until the moisture has gone, then cool before filling.
- "Paprica"Period spelling of paprika. In American books of this period it usually meant a sweet, mild paprika used as much for colour as for heat, so sweet paprika rather than smoked or hot is the safer choice here.
- The eggOne beaten egg poured over this much filling is a light binder, not a custard. It will set into a thin savoury glue around the fish rather than a quiche-like body.
- Rich pie-doughIn this period that means a short paste with a high proportion of butter or butter and lard, sometimes with an egg yolk, rather than a plain water crust. Any all-butter shortcrust made with about 8 oz flour to 5 oz fat, doubled for top and bottom, will do.
- Yield and servingSix servings. It cuts more cleanly after 10 minutes out of the oven, and wants something sharp alongside - dill cucumber, or a lemon wedge.
Fish pies of this kind belong to a broad northern European family in which the sea's cheaper protein is stretched with pastry, and Sweden's version is generally associated with the coastal tradition of combining a firm white fish with shellfish and dill or lemon. What is interesting here is less the Swedish credentials than the book itself, in which the national labels were often loose - a dish was "Swedish" because of an ingredient or a general impression rather than any documented provenance. The heavy use of lemon peel and paprika, and the assumption that a home cook could lay hands on oysters and shrimp in March, both point to an urban American kitchen rather than a Scandinavian one. Oysters were still cheap and abundant on the eastern seaboard at the time, which is why they turn up in so many recipes of the period as a casual addition rather than a luxury.