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Scalloped Fish
The remains of any description of cooked fish and shell-fish may be served in this way: mackerel and herrings are the least suitable for the purpose. Take the skin and bone from the fish, and tear the flesh into flakes. Mix with it a third of its weight in finely-grated bread-crumbs, or in well-mashed potatoes, and season the mixture rather highly with salt, cayenne, and grated nutmeg. Moisten slightly with the remains of sauce served with the fish, or, lacking this, with a little clarified butter. Butter some scallop shells, or some small shallow dishes, and line the inside with grated bread-crumbs. Put in the mixture, cover the surface with bread-crumbs, lay little pieces of butter here and there on the top, and bake in a well-heated oven or in a Dutch oven before the fire until the surface is brightly browned; serve very hot. Time to bake, about twenty minutes.
A leftovers dish, and it behaves like one: the quality depends entirely on the fish you start with and how much moisture you put back in. A few points translate it cleanly.
- "Well-heated oven"The original gives no temperature; a modern equivalent is a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. The mixture is already cooked through, so the whole job is browning the crumb topping quickly before the inside dries out. The recipe's twenty minutes suits standard scallop shells; smaller or shallower dishes will colour sooner.
- Reheating cooked fish safelyUse fish that has been properly chilled since it was cooked and use it within a day or two. Bring it to steaming hot right through, not merely browned on top. The original assumes a household eating yesterday's dinner from a cool larder, not a refrigerator's worth of accumulated leftovers.
- Scallop shellsReal shells were the standard serving vessel and still work if you have them; scrub and boil them before first use. Otherwise use shallow gratin dishes or ramekins of about 4-5 fl oz. Depth is the enemy here: the mixture should sit no more than an inch deep so it heats through as the top colours.
- The moistening stepThis is the hinge. Reserved fish sauce, a béchamel, or a few spoonfuls of cream will do; clarified butter alone gives a greasy, tight result. Aim for a mixture that just holds together when pressed, not a paste. Too dry and twenty minutes in a hot oven turns it to sawdust.
- ProportionsA third of the fish's weight in crumbs or mashed potato is a lot of filler by modern taste. Weigh it: 12 oz picked fish to 4 oz crumbs. If your fish is delicate, reduce the crumbs and the dish improves.
- Cayenne and nutmeg"Rather highly" seasoned means it: cold cooked fish is bland and the crumb dilutes further. Grated nutmeg with white fish and cream is a standard Victorian pairing and is worth keeping rather than substituting.
- Which fishCassell's calls mackerel and herring the least suitable rather than ruling them out; oily fish reheated in a hot oven can taste rank. Cod, haddock, hake, salmon, and any cooked shellfish work. Fresh crab or lobster picked from the shell is the luxury version of this dish.
- YieldRoughly 1 lb of picked cooked fish plus crumbs fills four to six scallop shells, enough for four as a light main course or six as a first course.
Scalloped dishes take their name from the scallop shell they were baked and served in, which made a convenient, heatproof, individual dish. Victorian household cookery treated the remains of a joint or a fish as a resource to be planned for, not an afterthought, and books of this period devote whole sections to "réchauffés" - reheated dishes dressed up enough to reappear at table without embarrassment. The Dutch oven mentioned here is not the modern lidded casserole but an open-fronted metal reflector set before the fire, which browned a surface much as a grill does now.