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Salt Fish Pie
Soak and boil the fish, and divide the flesh (freed from skin and bone) into neat squares. Take double its quantity in partially-boiled potatoes thinly sliced, together with as many partially-boiled and sliced onions as may be agreeable. Butter a pie-dish thickly, fill it with layers of sliced potato, fish, hard-boiled eggs and onions; season each layer with pepper and dry mustard, and place little pieces of fresh butter here and there in the pie. Pour over all a little egg sauce, cover with good pastry, and bake in a well-heated oven. When the pastry is sufficiently baked the pie will be done enough. If liked, mashed potatoes may be used to cover the pie instead of pastry, and the onions can be omitted altogether. A very good potato pasty may be made with salt fish (see POTATO PASTY).
A Victorian salt cod pie built from cupboard staples. The whole thing hangs on the soaking: everything else in the dish is bland, so if the fish is still fiercely salty the pie is inedible.
- Soaking the fishDried salt cod needs 24-36 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, with the water poured off and replaced three or four times. Taste a sliver of the raw flesh before you commit; it should read as seasoned, not salty.
- "Boil the fish" means poachOnce soaked, bring it up gently in fresh water or milk and hold it just below a simmer for 8-10 minutes until it flakes. A hard boil at this stage turns salt cod stringy and dry.
- Egg sauceThe original assumes you know it: a plain white sauce (roux of 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to half a pint of milk) with two chopped hard-boiled eggs stirred through. The recipe asks only for "a little," so use a few spoonfuls rather than the whole quantity, poured in loosely so the layers steam rather than swim.
- "A well-heated oven"400-425F for a pastry lid, on a lower shelf so the base sets. Allow 35-45 minutes; the pastry does indeed act as the timer, since every other component is already cooked.
- Partially-boiled potatoes and onionsGive the sliced potatoes 5-6 minutes in boiling water and the onions the same, or soften the onions in butter. Raw slices will not cook through in the time the pastry takes.
- ProportionsDouble the quantity of potato to fish, by the book: measured against the cooked flesh once skin and bone are out, so roughly 1 lb of prepared fish to 2 lb potatoes. The recipe does not say how many eggs; three or four suits a dish this size. Dry mustard is not optional seasoning here, it is the counterweight to the salt and the starch.
- YieldA pie built on these quantities needs a large, deep dish and serves four to six. The mashed-potato lid mentioned at the end is the better choice if you want to reheat leftovers, as pastry over a moist filling goes soft.
Salt fish pie belongs to the long British tradition of stretching preserved cod, which arrived dried and stiff as a board from the Newfoundland and Norwegian trades and kept for months in a dry larder. It was above all a Lenten and Friday dish, and nineteenth-century cookery books give many ways of serving it: creamed, in fishcakes, in pasties, and layered up with potato as here. Cassell's treats it as a matter of principle rather than a fixed formula, listing the variations (omit the onions, cap it with mash, or turn the same filling into a pasty) in the manner of a book teaching a household cook to work from what is in the house. The mustard and pepper seasoning is characteristic of the period's approach to salted fish, where sharpness was used to lift a flavour that soaking had deliberately flattened.