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Cassolettes of Fish
1/2 lb. cold cooked fish or shrimps 1/2 cupful milk 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful water 2 tablespoonfuls cream 4 tablespoonfuls flour Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful lemon juice 2 lbs. cooked potatoes 2 eggs Rub potatoes through a sieve, add little salt and pepper, 1 egg well beaten, and 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco and mix well. Roll out on floured baking board to 1 1/4 inches in thickness. Cut into small rounds, brush over with remaining egg well beaten, toss in fine breadcrumbs, mark the center slightly with a smaller round cutter. Fry to golden color in hot Crisco. Remove lids, carefully remove bulk of potatoes from inside, fill with mixture, replace lids, and serve hot. For mixture, blend 2 tablespoonfuls of the Crisco with flour in a saucepan over the fire, add milk, water and seasonings and cook for a few minutes. Put in flaked fish and make hot. Add cream last. 1/2 teaspoonful of anchovy extract may be added if liked. Sufficient for ten cassolettes.
A duchesse-potato case filled with creamed fish, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The success of the dish rests entirely on how dry the potato mixture is before it goes near the fat.
- Dry the potatoes hardUse floury baking potatoes, bake or boil them whole in their skins, and let the riced flesh steam dry in the hot pan for a minute or two before adding egg and fat. A wet mash will absorb frying fat, slump, and can burst in the pan.
- "Cassolette" means the case, not a dish"Cassolette" here refers to the container rather than the preparation -- a small fried potato cup with a cut lid, closer to a vol-au-vent than to the modern casserole. Marking the centre with a smaller cutter before frying is what lets you lift a clean lid afterwards.
- CriscoAny neutral solid shortening or vegetable oil works for the frying, and butter is better in the sauce and the potato mixture. The brand appears throughout the book because the book was published to sell it.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature, only "hot Crisco"; in modern terms roughly 360-375F suits these. Below that the crumb coating soaks; above it the outside colours before the potato heats through. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop.
- ThicknessOne and a quarter inches sounds excessive but is deliberate: you are hollowing the round out, so it must be tall enough to hold filling. Cut rounds about 2 inches across.
- The sauceFour tablespoons of flour to one cup of total liquid gives a very stiff panada, which is intentional so the filling does not run out of the case. Cook the roux a minute before adding liquid, and add the cream off the heat.
- The fishAlready-cooked fish or shrimp only needs to be brought hot in the sauce, a minute or so. Any longer and shrimp in particular turn to rubber. Flake, and check carefully for bones.
- Anchovy extractThe optional half teaspoon is essentially anchovy paste; a modern tube of it, or a dash of fish sauce, does the same job of sharpening bland white fish.
- YieldTen cassolettes, so five or six as a first course, or four as a light supper with a salad. Fill them at the last moment; a filled case left standing goes soft.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished around the 1910s: the cookbook issued by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, was launched by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and books like this one appeared to argue that it could stand in for butter, lard and suet at once, which is why it turns up here three times in a single fish recipe. The dish itself is straight out of the Anglo-French professional repertoire: duchesse potato, piped or cut and egg-washed, was a standard garnish, and hollowing it into a lidded case to hold a thick creamed filling is the same trick applied to potato instead of pastry. The name is the French cassolette, a small covered vessel for serving, which at some point came to describe any individual portion presented in a little case, edible or not.