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Fish, Cold, to Re-Dress
Put any cold fish-turbot, brill, soles, whiting, or smelt-cut small, into escallop-shells, with bread-crumbs and some good fish sauce-oyster, lobster, or shrimp. Place the shells in a Dutch oven, and cook until browned. Put a little butter on the top of each. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes.
A leftovers dish that depends entirely on the sauce and on not cooking the fish twice. Two terms in it mean something different now than they did in the 1890s.
- "Dutch oven" here is not a cast-iron pot"Dutch oven" here is probably not a cast-iron pot -- in Victorian English usage a Dutch oven was commonly a tin reflector screen set open-side to the fire, browning the top of a dish by radiant heat. The nearest modern equivalent is a broiler or the top of a hot oven, not a lidded casserole.
- "Fish sauce" is not the bottled Southeast Asian kindOyster, lobster or shrimp sauce in a Victorian kitchen means a white sauce or velouté enriched with the shellfish and its cooking liquor. A béchamel finished with chopped cooked shrimp or lobster and a little of the shell butter is the intent.
- Escallop shellsDeep scallop shells, sold cleaned for the purpose and reused indefinitely. Individual gratin dishes or 4-6 oz ramekins take their place; each holds roughly a half-cup of mixture.
- Heat and timeIf the browning was done in a reflector oven, fifteen to twenty minutes is a slow colouring. In a hot oven at 400-425F these will colour in roughly eight to twelve minutes, and under a broiler in only a few; that is all that is wanted, since the fish is already cooked. Longer only dries it.
- The hinge: sauce it generouslyCold cooked turbot, sole or whiting has already given up most of its moisture. The mixture should be loose and well-coated before it goes in, or reheating turns it to cotton wool.
- Butter on top before browning, not afterButter on top -- the recipe puts the butter on after browning. Dotting each shell with a scant teaspoon before it goes into the heat, so the butter bastes and browns the crumbs, is one reasonable reading, but a finishing knob of butter was also common.
- Fish choicesTurbot and brill are still sold but are expensive; any firm cooked white fish works, and smelt is now largely a specialty item. Avoid oily fish, which reheats badly.
- YieldRoughly a half-pound of picked cooked fish and a cup of sauce fills four shells, enough for four as a first course or two as a light supper.
Re-dressing is the Victorian household's polite word for using up yesterday's dinner, and a dictionary like Cassell's carries such entries because a large fish bought whole for a family table was never finished at one sitting. Serving the results in scallop shells was a common enough practice, and the verb to scallop allow dish with crumbs and sauce is often said to come from that habit, though it derives simply from the name of the shell; the shells themselves were sold by fishmongers and washed and kept in the kitchen drawer. The turbot and brill named first were prestige fish of the period, generally served whole and boiled with a shellfish sauce, so a cook re-dressing them the next day might well have had a lobster or shrimp sauce left over to fold in. The dish tells you something about the economics of a late-Victorian kitchen: expensive protein was never thrown away, but neither was it served twice in the same shape.