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For Fish (Lbs cooked white fish)
1 1/2 lbs. cooked white fish 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful breadcrumbs 1/2 cupful milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley 1 teaspoonful anchovy paste or extract Salt and pepper to taste Lemon slices Dutch or oyster sauce
What survives here is the ingredient list only; no method accompanies it on the page. The proportions — cooked flaked fish bound with a panade of breadcrumbs and milk, enriched with fat and eggs, then served with a sauce and lemon — are those of a baked fish loaf or moulded fish pudding of the period, and the notes below address the ingredients rather than supplying a procedure the original does not give.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening appears here where butter would be the obvious choice for fish; Crisco was pushed hard in this period, both by Procter & Gamble's own promotional cookbooks and by ordinary cookbooks that adopted it. Butter in the same quantity behaves the same way and tastes better with fish.
- White fishNot the smoked Great Lakes whitefish sold under that name today. In this period "white fish" meant any lean white-fleshed fish — cod, haddock, hake, halibut. About 2 lb of raw fillet yields the 1 1/2 lb cooked called for.
- Anchovy paste or extractAnchovy extract (essence) was a thin bottled liquid, saltier and looser than modern tubed paste. A teaspoon of paste is the closer substitute; taste before adding salt, since both the paste and the fish carry salt already.
- Dutch sauceThe older English name for the butter-and-egg-yolk sauce thickened over hot water that came to be called hollandaise, usually sharpened with lemon or vinegar. Oyster sauce here means a white sauce with poached oysters and their liquor, not the Cantonese bottled condiment.
- Oysters, if usedIf you make the oyster sauce, the oysters need barely two minutes in the hot liquid, just until the edges ruffle; longer cooking turns them to rubber.
- Oven, if baking as a loafA mixture of this kind sets in a moderate oven, 350F, in a greased mould or loaf tin, typically 40 to 50 minutes — until the centre is firm and reads 160F. A water bath keeps the eggs from curdling at the edges.
- YieldThe quantities serve four to six as a main course, rather more if the fish loaf is sliced cold for a luncheon plate.
Bound fish mixtures like this one — cooked fish, a milk-and-crumb panade, eggs, a little anchovy for depth — were among the ways Anglo-American kitchens turned leftover boiled fish into a second dinner, and they appear under a range of names: fish loaf, fish pudding, fish soufflé, entrée of fish. The anchovy is often taken as a sign of English descent; anchovy essence was the workhorse savoury seasoning of nineteenth-century British cookery, used much as we now use fish sauce or Worcestershire, and "Dutch sauce" is likewise the older English term that hollandaise gradually displaced. That the fat specified is Crisco rather than butter places the page firmly after 1911, when the shortening was introduced and Procter & Gamble began distributing cookbooks and menu calendars that quietly worked the product into a wide range of dishes, fish courses included.