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Ling Pie
Take three or four pounds of the thin part of a salt ling, wash it in two or three waters, and let it soak for a couple of hours; then put it into a fish-kettle, with as much water as will cover it, and let it boil slowly until done enough. Take off the skin, and put layers of the fish into a pie-dish, with four hard-boiled eggs cut into slices, a little chopped parsley, two tea-spoonfuls of salt, half a tea-spoonful of cayenne, and half a tea-spoonful of pounded mace strewn amongst them. Add three ounces of fresh butter divided into small pieces; pour over the fish a quarter of a pint of gravy. Line the edges of the dish with a good crust, place a cover of the same over the top, brush it over with egg, and bake in a brisk oven. Before serving pour a cupful of warm cream into the pie. Time to bake, about one hour and a half. Probable cost of ling, 4d. per pound. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A salt-fish pie of the cheap, filling sort that Cassell's aimed at large households. Two things in the original need rethinking: the soaking and the baking time.
- Soak much longer, and tasteTwo hours will not draw the salt from modern salt cod or ling, which is usually cured hard. Soak it refrigerated for 24 to 48 hours, changing the water three or four times, and taste a poached scrap before you commit it to the dish.
- Leave out the added saltThe two teaspoonfuls of salt assume a lightly cured, well-soaked fish. With today's bacalao-style cure, omit the salt entirely and season only at the end if needed.
- Finding lingLing (Molva molva) is still landed in northern Europe but rarely sold salted outside specialist shops. Salt cod, salt pollock or salt hake will stand in here. Note that the recipe's two-hour soak suggests a wet-salted fish rather than a hard-dried one, so if you are starting from stiff dried fish, about 2 lb rehydrated is nearer a sensible modern quantity than 3 to 4 lb.
- Oven and timeA "brisk oven" is generally taken as somewhere around 400 to 425F. The stated hour and a half is for a heavy Victorian range and a thick raised crust; the fish is already cooked, so bake only until the pastry is set and browned, roughly 35 to 45 minutes, dropping to 375F if it colours too fast.
- MeasuresA quarter of a pint of gravy is 5 fl oz in imperial measure, about half a cup plus two tablespoons. A cupful of cream is another 8 fl oz or so. Three ounces of butter is six tablespoons.
- Pounded maceGround mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg. Half a teaspoon is plenty; it is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg and is what makes the dish taste of the period.
- Getting the cream inCut a small vent in the lid before baking, and pour the warmed cream through it as soon as the pie leaves the oven so it is drawn into the fish rather than sitting on top.
- YieldSix or seven as the original claims, if served with potatoes and a green vegetable; four as a main course on its own.
Ling is a long, lean relative of the cod, once landed in quantity in the North Atlantic and cured in large volume because it salts and dries well. At fourpence a pound it was among the cheaper animal foods available to a Victorian household, and salt fish pies of this kind were standard fast-day fare. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was aimed at the servant-keeping middle class, so recipes routinely close with a cost per pound and a number of persons served, as this one does. The technique here is characteristic of salt-fish cookery: soak, poach, flake, then enrich heavily with butter, cream and eggs to put back the fat and moisture that curing took out.