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Macaroni Fish
Cold cod is most often used for this dish. Separate three ounces of the fish into small flakes, or chop it very finely, if preferred. Mix it with six ounces of macaroni, boiled and drained as before indicated, and three ounces of grated cheese. Toss it together for a few minutes in a stewpan, with a good lump of butter, or turn it out at once on a hot dish with more grated cheese over the top, to be browned with a salamander. Scallops of salmon or sturgeon, cooked en timbale, are highly appreciated. Time, one hour to prepare; twenty to twenty-five minutes to boil macaroni. Probable cost, 5d. to 6d. per pound.
A leftovers dish built on three-to-six-to-three: fish, macaroni, cheese. The only real trap is the pasta timing, which belongs to an era of much coarser dried macaroni.
- Boiling the macaroniTwenty to twenty-five minutes will reduce modern dried macaroni to paste. Today's extruded pasta needs 8-11 minutes, and slightly under is better here since it gets tossed in a hot pan or run under the grill afterwards.
- SalamanderA flat iron plate heated red and held over the dish to brown the top. An overhead grill or broiler at full heat does the same job in two or three minutes; keep the dish close to the element so the cheese colours before the inside dries out.
- Quantities and yieldThree ounces of fish, six of macaroni, three of cheese is about 85g, 170g and 85g — a supper for two, or a starter for three. Scale up in the same proportion; the dish tolerates more fish better than more cheese.
- The cheeseCassell's would have meant a dry Cheddar or Cheshire, or Parmesan for the topping. Any hard grating cheese works, but something dry rather than a young melting cheese, or the mixture turns oily when tossed in the butter.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are plausible period-appropriate additions, and cayenne appears often with cheese and fish in Victorian cookery.
- Reheating cold fishCold cooked cod flakes cleanly but should be brought properly hot again in the pan or under the grill, not merely warmed through. Pick it over for bones and skin before flaking.
- "En timbale"The closing note refers to a separate treatment — fish cooked in a lined mould — rather than an instruction for this dish. Sturgeon is a passing suggestion; wild sturgeon species are now protected and most sturgeon sold today is farmed.
- "One hour to prepare"This assumes the cod was cooked earlier and is being used up. With fish already to hand, the dish takes about twenty minutes start to finish.
Macaroni was familiar in British kitchens well before the nineteenth century, largely as a vehicle for cheese, and Cassell's treats it as a pantry staple rather than a foreign novelty — sold dry, boiled long, and combined with whatever the larder held. This entry sits squarely in the Victorian economy of leftovers: cold boiled cod was often said to be a Friday and Lenten dish in Britain, and general cookery books of the period commonly carried a run of recipes for using it up the next day, from fish cakes and kedgeree to gratins like this one. The costing in pence per pound is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for households keeping accounts, and the casual mention of salmon and sturgeon at the end marks the boundary between the everyday version and what the same technique could become in a grander kitchen.