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Salmon Pie
Take about three pounds of fresh salmon. Remove the skin, raise the flesh from the bones, and divide it into pieces convenient for serving. Season every piece separately with salt, pepper, and pounded mace. The latter of these must be added sparingly. Shell a pint of shrimps, and pound them with an ounce of butter and a pinch of cayenne. Put the pieces of salmon in a dish, and intersperse the pounded shrimps amongst them. Make some fish gravy by boiling the skin and bones of the fish in water till the liquor will jelly when cold. Fill the dish with this, cover it with good pastry, and bake in a well-heated oven. This pie is too rich for delicate stomachs. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, 4s., with salmon at 1s. per pound.
A raised-lid fish pie of the kind Victorian households ate as often cold as hot. Nearly all the modern adjustment is about the hour in the oven, which is set by the pastry rather than the fish.
- The hinge: the pastry clock, not the fish clockThree pounds of salmon under a lid does not need an hour; the fish is done in 20-25 minutes and will be dry and chalky long before the crust colours. Cut the salmon into generous pieces (5-6 cm), keep the filling cold going in, and consider baking the lid on a hot sheet at 425F for 20 minutes, then dropping to 350F for the remainder so the pastry sets fast while the interior comes up slowly.
- "A well-heated oven"Conventionally read today as somewhere around 425-450F, the range wanted for pastry. The book itself gives no thermometer figures; such equivalents are a modern gloss on the older vocabulary.
- A pint of shrimpsMeasured in the shell, as sold from the barrow. An imperial pint of small brown shrimps yields only a few ounces of picked meat, perhaps 4-6 oz; buying about that weight of cooked, peeled small shrimp or brown shrimps gets you to roughly the same place. Pounded with the ounce of butter and cayenne they become a coarse potted-shrimp paste, not a puree, and a food processor pulsed a few times does the work of the mortar.
- Pounded maceBlade mace ground fine, not nutmeg, though nutmeg is the nearest substitute and should be used sparingly. The warning to add it sparingly is sound: a scant quarter teaspoon across three pounds of fish is plenty.
- The fish gravySimmer the skin and bones with a little onion and a bay leaf for 30-40 minutes only; salmon frames turn bitter and glue-like if boiled hard or long. It will set to a soft jelly when cold because of the collagen, which is what makes the pie sliceable cold. Strain it well and use it barely warm, not hot, or it will start cooking the fish before it reaches the oven.
- Filling the dishFill with stock to about two-thirds the depth of the fish rather than to the brim. A pie funnel or a couple of slits in the lid keep the crust from lifting and the gravy from boiling out over the rim.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of salmon plus pastry serves eight generously. The jellied gravy means the pie will also slice cold, though the recipe itself says nothing about how it was served; if serving cold, let it cool completely before cutting.
- The costing4s. for the whole pie, with salmon at 1s. a pound, is consistent with three pounds of fish plus shrimps, butter and pastry. It fixes the entry to a particular market moment and is no use as a shopping guide now.
Fish pies with a raised or covered crust are among the older English pie forms, and salmon suits the treatment because its firm flesh holds up in large pieces and its bones and skin throw a stock that sets to jelly without help — the property that lets a cold pie be kept and sliced. The pairing with pounded shrimp and butter reads as a Victorian refinement of the older potted-fish habit, essentially potted shrimps distributed through the pie as seasoning. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a large alphabetical compendium of the later nineteenth century, is full of these costed entries, and the aside that the pie is "too rich for delicate stomachs" belongs to a period when digestibility was discussed in cookbooks as seriously as flavour.