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Fish and Eggs
Take any nice pieces of cold cooked fish, heat well in boiling water, and drain thoroughly. Boil three eggs hard, shell them, and cut them into four lengthwise. Take some cold potatoes, and cut about two dozen slices. Melt three ounces of butter, and add to it a tea-spoonful of made mustard, the same of vinegar and of Harvey's sauce, and season with salt and pepper. Arrange the pieces of fish, and the slices of eggs and potatoes in a fireproof dish, pour the sauce over, and put into an oven until thoroughly hot. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian leftovers dish: cooked fish, hard-boiled egg and boiled potato bound by a sharp butter sauce and warmed through. The only thing that can go wrong is overcooking, since every element is already cooked.
- Harvey's sauceA bottled anchovy-and-soy condiment, sharpened with vinegar and shallot, that was a fixture of British larders into the twentieth century and is no longer widely available. Worcestershire sauce is the closest current stand-in, in the same quantity.
- Made mustard"Made" means mixed and ready, as opposed to dry mustard powder. Any prepared English mustard works; a teaspoon of it is assertive, which is the point.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. The dish only needs warming through: 350F for 15-20 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling at the edges, is enough; longer will dry the fish and toughen the egg whites.
- Skip the boiling waterHeating the fish in boiling water and draining it was presumably a way of warming, and perhaps freshening, day-old fish. With fish kept cold it risks waterlogging the flakes; you can go straight to the dish.
- Butter quantityThree ounces is about six tablespoons, generous but correct for two dozen potato slices; it is the whole sauce. Whisk the mustard, vinegar and sauce into the melted butter off the heat so it does not split before it reaches the dish.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish or salmon. Flake it into large pieces rather than shredding it, so it holds its shape once hot.
- Yield and costProbably enough for two or three as a supper dish. The "probable cost, 1s." is the book's price note, and a shilling marks this as a thrifty use-up rather than a dinner course.
Cassell's belonged to the era of large households, cold larders and a standing obligation to use yesterday's fish, and this entry is a textbook example of the reheated composition dish that resulted: cooked protein, cooked starch, hard-boiled egg, and a bottled-sauce dressing to carry the flavour. Anchovy-based commercial sauces of that type were among the earlier branded convenience foods in Britain, and by the nineteenth century they were sold alongside mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire; cookery writers used them freely as a shortcut to the savoury depth we would now reach for in stock or umami-rich pastes. The per-dish costing that closes most Cassell's entries belonged to a market in which the cook might be accountable to a housekeeper, and it tells you how this dish was understood: not as a treat but as a defensible way of spending a shilling.