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Fish and Oyster Pie
Make a seasoning of bread-crumbs, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and parsley chopped fine. Lay any remains of cold fish into a pie-dish; let them be neatly cut into scallops, and cleared from all skin and bone; sprinkle with pepper and salt. Make a layer of oysters, and cover with the seasoning. Fill up the dish with alternate layers of fish, oysters, and seasoning. Cover with bars of puff paste, and bake, pouring in melted butter dissolved with the liquor of the oysters. Time, according to size. When the pastry is done the pie will be ready for serving.
A leftovers dish from the era when a household expected cold boiled turbot or cod to reappear at the next meal. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how deep a pie-dish is and how long puff paste takes; a few numbers help.
- The hinge: the fish is already cookedEverything but the oysters and the pastry is warmed through, not cooked from raw. Bake only until the paste is done and the filling is hot, and choose a shallow dish so the centre heats before the crust burns.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven heat. As a modern setting, puff paste takes a hot oven, around 425F, for roughly 25-30 minutes for a dish 2 inches deep. "Time, according to size" means exactly that: judge by the pastry, as the text says, and check that the filling is steaming.
- "Bars of puff paste"A lattice of strips rather than a sealed lid, which lets steam escape and keeps the filling from turning watery. Ready-rolled all-butter puff sheet is a fair substitute; cut it into 1-inch bands.
- Oysters need almost no cookingShucked oysters firm up in a minute or two. Layer them raw, let the oven do the work, and do not pre-poach them or they will be rubbery by the time the pastry colours.
- Oyster liquorStrain the liquid from the shucked oysters through a fine sieve or muslin to catch grit, then warm it with the melted butter before pouring it in. Roughly 2 oz butter to the liquor of a dozen oysters is about right for a family-sized dish.
- Nutmeg and the seasoningNutmeg is standard in seasonings of this kind, and a modern cook may find the quantity in period mixtures assertive. A few gratings across the whole pie is plenty; the same goes for the parsley, finely chopped so it does not sit in wet clumps.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish works: cod, haddock, hake, pollock. Flake it in generous pieces rather than shredding, and be thorough about skin and pin bones, as the original insists.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a working scale, about 1 lb cooked fish, a dozen oysters and 2 oz breadcrumbs will fill a dish of roughly 1 to 1.5 quarts and serve four. Season each fish layer lightly, since cooked fish and oyster liquor both carry salt of their own.
Fish pies built from "any remains of cold fish" belong to the Victorian economy of the second-day dinner, where a large boiled fish served hot with sauce on one day came back the next under pastry. Oysters do the work of a flavouring here rather than a luxury: for much of the nineteenth century they were cheap enough in British ports and cities to be used freely in stuffings, sauces and steak pies, and their liquor was valued as a ready-made fish stock. Overfishing, pollution and disease progressively damaged the native oyster beds over the second half of the century, which is what turned dishes like this from thrift into expense. The recipe reads as a method more than a formula -- alternate layers, a seasoning of crumbs and herbs, a moistening liquid, a crust -- that a cook could apply to whatever the larder held.