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SALMON, RAISED PIE OF (to be serve cold)
Take two pounds of fresh salmon, and one and a half pounds of whiting forcemeat. Remove the skin and bone from the salmon, cut it into neat slices, and season each slice separately with salt and cayenne. Line the pie-mould with pastry (see RAISED PIES), and fill with alternate layers of forcemeat and fish, and let forcemeat form the undermost and uppermost layers. Cover the pie with pastry, and finish in the usual way. Bake, and when done enough let it get cool, then pour into it through an incision in the top a liquid jelly made by boiling the bones and skin of the salmon in water and flavouring it pleasantly with salt, cayenne, and essence of truffles. Close the hole, and serve the pie on a neatly-folded napkin. To make the forcemeat, press one pound of the flesh of whiting through a sieve. Pound the pulp till smooth with ten ounces of panada and ten ounces of butter. Add salt and cayenne, and moisten the preparation with the yolk of an egg and a little rich white sauce. Make it in a cool place. In order to ascertain when the pie is done enough, run a skewer through the centre, quite to the bottom. If the meat feels tender, it is done. Probable cost, 4s.
A cold raised pie in the French style, built on a whiting quenelle forcemeat rather than the pork farce of an English game pie. The forcemeat is the hinge: it is nearly half butter and panada by weight, and if it warms up while you work it will split and weep fat into the crust.
- Keep the forcemeat cold"Make it in a cool place" is the whole instruction. Chill the sieved fish, the butter and the bowl, and work in short bursts; a food processor does the pounding in seconds but also heats the mixture, so pulse and rest.
- PanadaA thick binding paste, here almost certainly the standard bread or flour panada: milk or stock thickened with flour (or crustless bread soaked and dried out over heat) and cooked to a stiff mass, then cooled. Ten ounces of it to a pound of fish is a classic quenelle proportion.
- WhitingAvailable in Britain but scarce elsewhere. Any lean white fish that purees smoothly works: pollock, haddock, hake or cod. Avoid oily fish, which will not set as a pale forcemeat.
- Raised pastryThe cross-reference is to hot-water crust, made stiff enough to stand. Cassell's assumes a hinged raised-pie mould; a springform tin lined with pastry is the practical substitute. This crust is structural and is meant to be sturdy, not flaky.
- OvenThe book gives none. Start at 400F to set the case, then drop to 350F for the remaining time; a pie of this size will want roughly an hour and a half. The skewer test is sound, but an instant-read thermometer at the centre is better: 145F.
- The jellySalmon skin and bone will give some body, but the set may be weak, so reduce the stock well and strain it clear; add softened gelatine if it does not set, at about 1 teaspoon powdered gelatine per cup of liquid. Pour it in barely warm, into a fully cold pie, or it will melt the forcemeat.
- Essence of trufflesA commercial flavouring bottle of the period. Truffle oil is the nearest modern thing and should be used in drops, not spoonfuls; a spoonful of dry sherry or a little mushroom stock is a less assertive alternative.
- CayenneUsed here in small quantities as a seasoning alongside the salt rather than for obvious heat. Season each slice lightly.
- Yield and servingThree and a half pounds of filling plus crust serves ten to twelve as a cold table dish. Chill overnight so the jelly sets firm, and cut with a long thin blade.
Raised pies of fish belong to the cold collation - the buffet of hams, galantines, salads and moulded jellies that a Victorian household put out for supper parties, ball suppers and summer luncheons, where everything had to be made in advance and look well standing on a sideboard. The technique is French: a whiting farce bound with panada and butter is the same mixture used for quenelles, and setting fish in aspic under a raised crust is a professional confectioner's trick for keeping the meat moist once cold. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, like most late nineteenth-century British compendia, moves freely between plain English cookery and the French repertoire its readers had met in restaurants and hotels, and the "probable cost" of 4s. attached here is a reminder of who the book was written for - a housekeeper budgeting a dish that may well have come to a good part of a servant's weekly cash wage, though such wages varied widely and were paid alongside board and lodging.