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Fish Rechauffe
Take any fish, cooked, free from skin and bones, flake it, and to every pound add half a pint of cream, and one small spoonful each of Worcester sauce, mushroom ketchup, essence of anchovy, and mustard. Thicken the sauce with butter rolled in flour, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Put the fish and the sauce into a stewpan, and when hot place it carefully on a dish; cover with bread-crumbs, and baste with butter for a few minutes while it is before the fire. Brown with a salamander, or raise a wall of mashed potatoes round the dish, two and a half inches high, and place the ragout in the centre. Pike, cod, turbot, soles, and haddock do well for this dish.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled fish: flaked fish in a sharply seasoned cream sauce, browned under heat or ringed with potato. The whole thing hinges on not cooking the fish a second time — it only needs to come up to serving heat.
- Half a pint of creamIn imperial measure half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups per pound of fish. The recipe does not specify which cream; a heavier cream is less likely to split under the seasonings.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled anchovy extract, once standard in British larders. Anchovy paste from a tube is the direct equivalent — start with a scant teaspoon, as it is saltier than the Victorian product.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom infusion, not a tomato condiment. Still sold in Britain; failing that, a teaspoon of soy sauce with a few drops of Worcestershire gives a comparable savoury depth.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded together, whisked into the hot cream in small pieces. About 2 teaspoons of each will thicken 10 fl oz.
- Reheating, not recookingFold the flaked fish into the finished sauce off the heat and warm it through for two or three minutes at most. Already-cooked cod, haddock or sole turns cottony and weeps water if it simmers.
- Salamander and "before the fire"A salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the dish; "before the fire" means propped facing the open grate. Use the broiler on high, 3-4 inches from the element, for two or three minutes until the crumbs colour.
- The potato wallPipe or spoon stiff mashed potato around the rim of a gratin dish to the specified 2½ inches before filling the centre. The recipe itself gives no oven stage or temperature for the potato.
- Turbot and pikeBoth are hard to find and expensive now. Any firm cooked white fish works; salmon or smoked haddock also suit the sauce, though the smoked fish makes the anchovy and Worcestershire redundant.
- YieldA pound of cooked fish with this quantity of sauce serves three as a main course, four with the potato border.
Réchauffé is simply French for "reheated," and it served as the polite English term for a made-over dish — the respectable face of leftovers in households where a large boiled turbot or cod appeared at dinner and could not be served twice in the same form. It is a method rather than a dish: any cooked white fish, any day of the week. The seasonings tell you a good deal about the late Victorian store cupboard, where Worcestershire sauce, mushroom ketchup and essence of anchovy were among the bottles used to give bland cold food a savoury lift. The salamander and the direction to brown the crumbs "before the fire" point to kitchens with an open range; the alternative border of mashed potato is the same idea as a scallop shell or a coquille, giving the dish a shape at table so that it read as a course rather than a remnant.