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Halibut Ramekins
Flake rather finely 1 1/2 pounds cooked halibut. See that it is free from bones and skin. Have ready 1 pint seasoned white sauce. Crisco few fireproof dishes.
Mix halibut with sauce, season with salt and pepper, then fill dishes with it, smooth over surface with wetted knife, and cover with thin layer white sauce. Sprinkle top with mixture of breadcrumbs and grated cheese, and place a few tiny bits Crisco here and there on surface. Bake in fairly hot oven 25 minutes, so as to get it thoroughly heated and surface browned. Dish up and serve hot.
A tidy way to use up leftover poached or baked fish. The recipe assumes you already know how to make white sauce and that Crisco is sitting on the counter, since the book was published to sell it.
- "Crisco few fireproof dishes"Crisco is used as a verb here, meaning grease. Any shortening, butter or oil does the job; "fireproof dishes" means individual ovenproof ramekins or a small gratin dish.
- Oven temperatureA "fairly hot oven" in this period is generally taken as somewhere around 400F, though period scales vary. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the 25 minutes is only to heat through and brown the top.
- The white sauceA pint is 2 cups. For a sauce thick enough to bind flaked fish and still spread as a top layer, work from 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk, seasoned well. Underseasoned bechamel is the usual failure point with halibut, which is very mild.
- Fish quantity and yieldA pound and a half of cooked halibut is roughly 2 lb raw. Mixed with a pint of sauce it fills six to eight standard ramekins, or serves four to six as a main course with bread and a salad.
- Flake, do not mashFlake while the fish is cold; warm halibut breaks down into paste. Check carefully for stray bones, since the dish is eaten with a spoon and nobody expects to find them.
- Cheese for the topA dry grating cheese such as Parmesan or a hard aged Cheddar suits the dish. Watch the last five minutes so the crumbs do not catch.
- SubstitutionsPacific halibut is widely available, but any firm white fish works, including cod, haddock or pollock. Smoked haddock is a common alternative here.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks to use a new product, in this case Procter and Gamble's hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911. That is why the instruction reads "Crisco few fireproof dishes" rather than "butter" or "grease" -- the brand name is doing double duty as a verb throughout the book. The dish itself is a straightforward English-American ramekin, a small baked dish of something bound in white sauce and browned on top; the word comes from the French ramequin, which is generally traced back to a cheese preparation, and by the late nineteenth century it was used both for the little pot and for whatever was baked in it.