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Fish Kedgeree
Pick some cooked salmon, turbot, or other fish into flakes, and boil a cupful of rice in good white broth; add the fish to the rice, and when hot through, stir in an egg, and serve. Time, thirty minutes to boil the rice. Probable cost, exclusive of fish, 4d.
A short Victorian formula that assumes leftover cooked fish and a pot of broth already on the stove. The whole thing comes together in a few minutes once the rice is done.
- The egg is the hingeStir the beaten egg in off the heat, or over the barest warmth, and keep it moving. Left over direct heat it scrambles into curds instead of binding the rice and fish into a soft, creamy mass.
- Rice cooked in broth"Good white broth" is a light, unbrowned stock — veal or chicken, or fish stock if that is what you have. The recipe simply says to boil the rice in it and does not say how much liquid to use.
- Thirty minutes is for old riceThirty minutes is period practice -- It reflects the rice and the soft, well-cooked texture of the time. Long-grain rice from a modern bag needs 12–15 minutes, basmati closer to 10. Judge by grain, not by the clock in the original.
- A cupful of riceRoughly 200 g dry, yielding enough for three or four as a light dish. Match it with about the same volume of flaked fish.
- Turbot and salmonTurbot is expensive and scarce now; any firm cooked white fish works, and smoked haddock — the standard choice in later British kedgeree — gives far more flavour than the book's plain boiled fish.
- Bones and skin"Pick into flakes" is the real work. Go over the fish by hand for pin bones and skin before it meets the rice, where they are impossible to find.
- Seasoning is left to youCassell's gives none. Salt, pepper, a good knob of butter and lemon juice are all wanted; curry powder, cayenne or chopped parsley if you want the version most people now expect.
- Cost4d. exclusive of fish marks this as a thrift dish for using up the remains of a boiled fish rather than a reason to buy salmon.
Kedgeree comes from khichri, the Indian dish of rice and pulses, which British households in India are generally said to have adapted by adding fish and hard-boiled egg; on the usual account the anglicised name and the fish are both additions made abroad rather than anything native to the original. It reached British breakfast tables through returning colonial families in the nineteenth century and settled in as a way of using cooked fish left from the day before, which is exactly the role it plays here — Cassell's costs it without the fish, and assumes the fish is already in the larder. The later Victorian and Edwardian version, spiced with curry powder and finished with quartered eggs, is generally traced to this same colonial route; this entry catches the dish at a plainer stage, bound with a raw egg stirred in rather than garnished with boiled ones.