Home › The Principles of Cookery › Fish Toast
Fish Toast
Put into a saucepan the yolks of two eggs, a gill of milk, and about two ounces of cold fish flaked. Mix well, and let it just thicken over the fire. Have ready six rounds of toast and spread them with bloater or anchovy paste. Lay the mixture of eggs, fish, etc., on the toast, sprinkle a little cayenne, some bread-crumbs, and a little butter over, and brown quickly in the oven for about eight minutes. Serve very hot, garnished with water-cress. Probable cost, 1s.
A late-Victorian savoury built on leftovers: cooked fish bound in a loose egg custard, piled on toast and flashed under heat. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the fish is cooked.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, roughly 140 ml. With two yolks this gives a thin custard that thickens fast.
- The hinge: do not let it boil"Let it just thicken over the fire" means low heat and constant stirring until the mixture coats the spoon. Yolks set from about 150F and scramble not far above; once it curdles there is no rescue. A heatproof bowl over simmering water buys you a margin.
- Cold fish flakedTwo ounces (about 55 g) of any leftover cooked white fish, salmon or smoked haddock, picked clean of bone and skin. This is a use-it-up dish, not one to poach fish specially for.
- Bloater pasteA bloater is a lightly smoked, whole-salted herring, and the potted paste was a staple of the Victorian larder. Anchovy paste is still sold and does the same job; a little mashed anchovy fillet or a Scandinavian herring paste is the closest substitute.
- Brown quicklyA hot oven, in the region of 425-450F, will set the crumbs and colour the butter in eight minutes without drying the custard. A grill or broiler for two or three minutes works as well, watched closely.
- CayenneVictorian savouries were seasoned assertively, though the strength of what was sold as cayenne varied. A pinch across all six rounds is enough.
- YieldSix small rounds, which is one savoury course for six at the end of a dinner, or a light lunch for two with the water-cress as salad rather than garnish.
- Probable costOne shilling for the six, quoted so a cook could price a course before ordering. Useless as a modern figure, but it tells you the dish was meant to be cheap.
Fish toast belongs to the savoury, the small hot, salty course that closed a British dinner between the sweet and the dessert fruit through the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery is full of them, and they share a logic: a strong flavour, usually anchovy, bloater or cheese, spread thin on toast and browned. Their other function was economy. A large household bought fish whole and cooked it whole, and the two ounces of flaked remainder here might otherwise have gone to the kitchen cat. The costing that ends the entry is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for the servant-keeping middle class who wanted to know what a dish should cost before the cook was allowed to make it. Water-cress, cheap and sold from London street barrows by the bunch, is often said to have been the usual garnish for anything brown and buttery.