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Fish, Creamed
Take a haddock or whiting, or any other white fish that will flake easily. Gently boil it for fifteen or twenty minutes, then remove the flesh carefully from the bones, breaking it separately into flakes; season with pepper and salt and a few drops of lemon-juice. For every pound of prepared fish make a rich melted butter sauce with four table-spoonfuls of butter, two of flour, and a pint of milk in which a small slice of onion has been boiled. Put the fish into a fireproof dish, pour the sauce gently over. Sprinkle the top with bread-crumbs and small flecks of butter, and bake in a hot oven for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d.
A plain fish gratin built on a flour-thickened white sauce. Two things in the original need translating: what Victorian cooks meant by "melted butter sauce," and how long white fish actually wants to cook.
- "Melted butter sauce" is a roux sauceDespite the name, this is butter and flour cooked together and let down with milk — what we would call a béchamel or white sauce. Four tablespoons butter to two of flour is a butter-rich roux; cook it a minute or two before adding the milk so the sauce does not taste pasty.
- A pint of milkAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so use about 2½ US cups. With two tablespoons of flour the sauce will be loose; reduce the milk to 2 cups if you want it to cling to the flakes rather than pool.
- Poach, do not boilFifteen to twenty minutes at a boil will shred haddock or whiting into cotton wool. Bring the water barely to a tremble and give a thick fillet 6 to 8 minutes, or a whole small fish 10 to 12 — it is done the moment the flesh parts from the bone. It then gets a further 20 minutes in the oven.
- "A hot oven"425–450°F. The fish is already cooked, so the oven's only job is to heat the sauce through and colour the crumbs; if the top browns before the dish bubbles at the edges, drop to 400°F or finish under the grill.
- The infused milkThe recipe's only flavouring for the sauce itself is the slice of onion boiled in the milk. Warm the milk with the onion, let it sit off the heat for ten minutes, then strain the onion out before the milk goes into the roux.
- Fireproof dishA shallow ovenproof gratin dish or pie plate. Shallow matters: a deep dish gives you a lot of sauce and little crust.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh soft ones from a bag, or they will go soggy under the sauce's steam. The flecks of butter are what brown them.
- YieldA pound of picked fish with this quantity of sauce serves three as a main course or four as a light supper dish. Allow a whole haddock of around two to two and a half pounds to yield roughly that much flaked flesh.
- "Probable cost, 8d"Eightpence in pre-decimal currency — a costing figure, not an instruction. Cassell's gave one for nearly every entry so a housekeeper could plan against a weekly budget.
Creamed fish belongs to the large Victorian and Edwardian family of dishes designed to make cooked or leftover fish presentable a second time: flake it, bind it in white sauce, crumb the top and brown it. The same logic produced fish pie, fish cakes and the endless "scallops" of the period, cooked in real scallop shells or small dishes. The entry names haddock and whiting but tells you plainly that any white fish that flakes will serve, which is how cheap fish actually reached the table in households that bought whatever the fishmonger had. Melted butter sauce, the flour-and-butter sauce that carries the dish, was so standard in British cookery that writers of the era treated it as a base to be memorised, and its poor reputation among later French-trained cooks says more about how carelessly it was often made than about the sauce itself.