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Salmon and Potato Pie
Take the remains of cold boiled salmon. Free the flesh from skin and bone, divide it into small pieces, and season each pound of them with a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of white pepper, and a grain of cayenne. Butter a shallow pie-dish, and spread over the bottom a layer of potatoes which have been mashed lightly with a little butter, milk, and the yolk of an egg. Put the pieces of fish on the potato, moisten with any fish sauce that may be left, and cover with another layer of potato. Rough the top of the pie with a fork, and put it in a brisk oven till the surface is brightly browned and the pie is quite hot. Serve it in the dish in which it was baked. Time to bake, about half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A leftovers dish, and it depends entirely on having good cold salmon and something moist to bind it. The instructions are sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- "Any fish sauce that may be left"This means the leftover sauce served with the original salmon — a béchamel, parsley sauce, or melted butter sauce — not the fermented anchovy condiment sold under that name today. Without it the pie bakes dry; about half a cup of white sauce or thin cream per pound of fish is right.
- A brisk oven425F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the heat is there to brown the potato crust and drive the pie hot through, not to cook it. Half an hour at that temperature is about right for a shallow dish; the centre should reach 165F.
- A grain of cayenneA grain was a real apothecaries' weight, roughly 65 milligrams, but here it most likely means the smallest pinch you can take up. Start with a pinch per pound and add more only to taste.
- The potatoMash while hot with butter, a little milk and egg yolk; the recipe specifies one yolk without saying for how much potato. The yolk helps the roughed-up ridges colour and crisp.
- Handling the fishBreak the salmon into pieces rather than flaking it to shreds, and do not compress the layer. Cold cooked salmon is already firm, and a second half-hour in the oven will tighten it further; loose, chunky pieces stay pleasant.
- On the leftovers themselvesCooked fish held in the refrigerator should be used within two days. The Victorian larder had no such margin, which is why books of this period return so often to next-day dishes for boiled salmon.
- Yield and costFour to five servings, as stated. The 1s 6d is given as the dish's 'probable cost'; the recipe does not say whether the leftover salmon is reckoned into it.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of household dictionaries written for cooks who were expected to account for every scrap, and the salmon pie is a good example: yesterday's expensive fish, yesterday's sauce, and potatoes to make it stretch to four or five people. Salmon was seasonal and could be dear in southern England before improved transport brought it packed in ice from Scotland and Ireland; a boiled whole salmon was a dish for company, and what remained was too valuable to waste. The construction — a savoury filling between layers of mashed potato, roughed with a fork — is the same idea as cottage pie, recorded from the late eighteenth century, and shepherd's pie, whose name appears later in the nineteenth century; both are usually associated with using up cold cooked meat. The instruction to serve it in the dish it was baked in fits the period's acceptance of the pie-dish at table.