Home › The Principles of Cookery › Fish Eggs, Scrambled
Fish Eggs, Scrambled
Beat up three eggs, add a table-spoonful of milk or cream, and season to taste. Melt two ounces of butter in a saucepan, add about three ounces of cooked fish, flaked, and fry for a few seconds. Stir in the eggs, etc., and keep stirring over the fire until the mixture begins to thicken. Have some slices of hot buttered toast ready, lay the mixture on them, and serve on hot plates. Probable cost, 1s.
FISH (en Matelote Fish may be served en matelote either whole or divided. Trout, pike, carp, tench, eels, etc., are good cooked in this way. Put an ounce of butter into a stewpan, and brown a dozen button-onions that have been scalded. Put in the fish, and add a half pint of gravy or stock, a glass of red wine, pepper, salt, allspice, a bay-leaf, and a carrot and turnip cut into slices. Take out the fish, thicken the gravy with flour and butter, and add mushrooms, the button-onions nicely browned, some oysters bearded and scalded, and small fish quenelles. Season to taste with anchovy, cayenne, and lemon-juice, and pour the gravy boiling hot over the fish. Time, three-quarters of an hour.
Two recipes have run together in the column: a plain supper dish of eggs scrambled with flaked fish, and a fish matelote, a wine-braised stew. Both are workable, but each needs a little translation.
- The title is misleading"Fish Eggs" here does not mean roe. It is scrambled eggs with cooked fish stirred through, a way of using up fish already cooked. The recipe does not say which; smoked haddock, salmon, cod or kipper all suit it.
- The hinge: take the eggs off early"Until the mixture begins to thicken" is the whole instruction. Pull the pan off the heat while the curds are still loose and glossy, as residual heat and the hot toast will finish them. Cooked to firmness they weep water from the fish and turn granular.
- Butter quantityTwo ounces (about 4 tbsp) of butter to three eggs is very rich by current taste. Half that is enough unless you want the classic soft, almost sauce-like Victorian scramble.
- Yield and costThree eggs and 3 oz of fish serves two on toast. "Probable cost, 1s." is one shilling, the book's habitual note of the price of the dish rather than any instruction.
- Matelote: the fish goes in rawThe second recipe is elliptical. The fish is put into the pan with the stock, wine and vegetables and simmered there; the "three-quarters of an hour" covers the whole operation, not just the sauce. A whole trout or thick eel sections will be done well before that, so lift the fish as soon as it flakes and let the liquid go on reducing.
- Button-onions and quenellesButton onions are small whole pickling onions, scalded to loosen the skins. Quenelles are poached dumplings of pounded raw fish bound with egg and cream; a food processor makes short work of what was once an hour with a mortar.
- Oysters, briefly"Bearded" means the frill trimmed off. Scald them only until the edges curl, a matter of seconds. Held in the hot gravy for any length of time they shrink and go rubbery.
- Thickening and seasoning"Thicken with flour and butter" is the period shorthand for flour and butter worked together and stirred into the simmering liquid -- what would now be called beurre manié, though the same instruction is made common in these books as a cooked roux, so either reading is defensible. "Anchovy" means anchovy essence or paste, a teaspoon or so; it is a seasoning here, not a garnish.
- MeasuresA glass of red wine in this period is usually reckoned somewhere between 2 and 4 fl oz; the wineglass was never a fixed measure. A half pint is 10 fl oz British, not 8.
Matelote takes its name from the French matelot, sailor, and is generally traced to the freshwater fish stews of the Loire and the Marne, where eel, carp and pike were simmered in the local wine with onions and a thickened sauce. Cassell's places it among the river fish that a British kitchen might actually encounter, though the ambitious garnish of oysters, mushrooms and quenelles marks it as a dinner-party dish rather than a boatman's one. The scrambled egg recipe above it belongs to the opposite end of the household economy entirely: it is a way of using up cold cooked fish, of a piece with the fish cakes, kedgerees and creams that fill several columns of the same dictionary. Between them the two entries show the range a Victorian cookery book was expected to cover on a single page, from Tuesday's leftovers to the fish course at a dinner of several removes.