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Cod Pie, Fresh
Take a deep pie-dish, and fill it three-parts with pieces of fresh cod about two inches square. Season them with salt, cayenne, and grated nutmeg, lay two dozen oysters on the top, and put two or three lumps of butter over all. Cover with a good crust, and bake the pie in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about forty minutes. Probable cost of cod, 8d. per pound, when plentiful. A pie made with three pounds of cod, and two dozen oysters, will be sufficient for six persons.
A plain Victorian fish pie under a pastry lid, with almost nothing in the way of liquid or binding. A few decisions the original leaves to the cook are worth making deliberately.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350°F (180°C). Forty minutes at that heat sets a shortcrust and cooks two-inch pieces of cod through; if you use puff pastry, start at 400°F for the first ten minutes to lift the layers, then drop back.
- The oysters are the problemTwo dozen oysters buried under a crust for forty minutes will come out shrunken and rubbery. They need two or three minutes of heat, no more. Either accept them as a seasoning rather than a delicacy, or lay them in only at the point the filling is already hot and the crust nearly done.
- Add liquidAs written the dish relies on the cod's own moisture and two or three lumps of butter, which gives a dry pie. Strain in the oyster liquor and about half a cup of fish stock or cream before the crust goes on.
- Quantities of seasoningFor three pounds of fish: roughly two teaspoons of salt, a scant quarter-teaspoon of cayenne and a quarter of a whole nutmeg, grated. Victorian cookery used nutmeg with fish far more freely than we do; less is easily defensible.
- Preparing the codSkin it and run a finger down each piece for pin bones. Loin or thick fillet holds its two-inch squares; tail pieces flake apart. Salting the fish half an hour ahead and patting it dry firms the flesh and draws out water that would otherwise thin the sauce.
- Vent the crustNo steam hole is mentioned, but fish throws off a good deal of liquid. Cut one, or the lid lifts and the seal breaks. A pie funnel does the same job and supports the pastry.
- Cost and yieldThe eightpence a pound is the book's own figure, and it is qualified in the text as the price "when plentiful", i.e. in season rather than year-round. The stated yield — three pounds of fish for six people — is generous by modern standards and will serve eight with a vegetable alongside.
The recipe belongs to the era when the railway and the ice-packed fish van had made sea fish cheap and reliable in inland British towns, and cod in particular became the everyday white fish of the middle-class table — hence the price note. The oysters tell the same story from the other end: through much of the nineteenth century oysters were plentiful and cheap enough in Britain to be used as bulk and flavouring in pies, sauces and steak puddings rather than eaten on their own, and beds along the Thames estuary and the Essex and Kent coasts supplied London in enormous quantities. Overfishing and pollution had already largely reversed that by the 1860s and 1870s, which is why a recipe casually calling for two dozen oysters to season three pounds of cod now reads as extravagance. The nutmeg-and-cayenne seasoning is older still, a survival of the English habit of spicing fish and meat pies that runs back well before the Victorian kitchen.