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Fish Scallp
Take half a pound of any cold fish; weigh it when the bones and skin have been removed. Put it into a stewpan, with walnut ketchup and made mustard, half a tea-spoonful of each, and half a table-spoonful of anchovy sauce, all of which should be mixed first with half a pint of cream and then with the fish. Heat all together, but it should not boil. Fill a dish or put into scallop-shells; cover with bread-crumbs, and place butter in small lumps over the top. Brown in the oven, or use a salamander. Time, a quarter of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the fish.
A Victorian way of using up cooked fish: a rich cream sauce, a crumb top, and a hot browning. The whole thing hangs on the fish being fully cooked already, since the baking only sets the crumbs.
- The cream measureHalf a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is a generous amount of cream for 8 oz of fish; the mixture should be loose but not soupy when it goes into the dish, so hold a little back if your fish is very flaky.
- Do not boil itThe instruction is explicit and worth respecting. Cream with mustard and salty bottled sauces stirred through it will break or turn grainy at a rolling boil, and made mustard loses its edge and turns faintly bitter with sustained heat.
- Walnut ketchupA thin, dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, vinegar and spice, widely used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery. It is still sold by a few British firms; mushroom ketchup is the closest substitute, and Worcestershire sauce will do at slightly reduced quantity.
- Anchovy sauceA commercial bottled sauce, thinner and milder than modern anchovy paste. Use about half a tablespoon of paste thinned with a little of the cream, or two mashed salted anchovy fillets, and taste before adding salt.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. A hot oven, 425F, for the quarter of an hour stated will brown the crumbs without cooking the cream down to oil. If the top is pale at the end, finish under the broiler.
- The salamanderA flat iron disc on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over the surface to glaze it. A broiler element does the same job; keep the dish 4-5 inches below it and watch continuously.
- Scallop-shellsDeep natural shells were kitchen equipment, scrubbed and reused. Ramekins, gratin dishes or small ovenproof bowls of about 4 oz capacity are the equivalent.
- Fish and yieldCold cooked cod, haddock, salmon or smoked fish all suit it; discard anything more than a day old. As written it fills four small shells and serves two as a lunch dish, three or four as a first course.
- The costingOne shilling "exclusive of the fish" prices the cream and bottled sauces, not the main ingredient. Cassell's assumed the fish came from the previous day's table at no additional cost.
"Scallop" here means the shell, not the shellfish: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries minced meat and fish were bound with sauce, heaped into cleaned scallop shells, crumbed and browned, and the word survives in the American "escalloped" potatoes. Cassell's, published in London from the 1870s, was written for households that dined off a joint or a whole fish and expected the cook to account for every scrap the next day; the anchovy sauce, walnut ketchup and made mustard are all shelf-stable bottled goods of the sort the Victorian larder kept to give leftovers a savoury lift. Walnut ketchup, made from unripe green walnuts steeped in salt and vinegar, was one of the oldest of English commercial condiments and was largely displaced by tomato ketchup and Worcestershire sauce over the following century. The salamander named at the end belongs to open-hearth cooking rather than the closed range, though such tools went on being used alongside closed ranges, so its appearance next to "the oven" tells us little in itself.