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Casserole of Fish
Any kind of cold cooked fish may be used. Flake the fish, season with salt and pepper and a little Worcestershire sauce, and moisten with cream sauce or thick cream. To each cup of flaked fish allow 1 hard-boiled egg and 1 cup of well-seasoned mashed potatoes. Butter a mould of the right size, line it with the potato, and fill the case with alternate layers of fish, slices of egg, and mashed potato. Steam twenty minutes, or bake in a moderately hot oven fifteen minutes. Turn out on a hot platter, and garnish with cress or parsley.
A leftovers dish built like a small potato-lined pie, and the potato case is what makes or breaks it. Everything hinges on the lining being thick enough and dry enough to hold when the mould is inverted.
- The potato liningPress the mash about half an inch thick up the sides of the buttered mould, and keep it stiff — mash made with plenty of butter and only a little milk. Wet mash will slump and the shape collapses when you turn it out.
- "Casserole" hereIn books of this period the word often refers to the shaped case that holds the filling — here the potato lining — rather than to a baked-in dish. A pudding basin, charlotte mould or straight-sided ovenproof bowl will serve; a loaf tin will do if you plan to serve in slices. The recipe itself specifies only "a mould of the right size."
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" corresponds to somewhere around 375-400F. Fifteen minutes is enough only to heat through and set the case, since everything inside is already cooked.
- Steaming insteadCover the mould tightly with buttered paper or foil and stand it in a pan of simmering water for the twenty minutes. Steaming gives a softer, moister result; the oven gives a faint crust that unmoulds more cleanly.
- Cream sauce quantityMoisten, do not soak — roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of thick béchamel or heavy cream per cup of flaked fish. Too much liquid and the layers slide apart on the platter.
- Which fishCooked cod, haddock, salmon, hake or any firm white fish flakes properly. Check carefully for bones and skin, since neither is forgiving in a moulded dish.
- YieldThe recipe fixes only the ratio: one hard-boiled egg and one cup of mashed potato to each cup of flaked fish. Three cups of fish, three eggs and three cups of potato comes to roughly six cups of material, so allow a mould of about 1½ to 2 quarts; it will serve four as a main course.
- UnmouldingLet it stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, and run a thin knife round the rim first. Serve the remaining cream sauce separately rather than over the top.
Moulded and shaped dishes of this kind were a common Victorian and Edwardian answer to cold cooked fish, which was plentiful in households that served a boiled cod or salmon and expected the remainder to reappear the next day in a different form. Books of this sort carry whole clusters of such entries: fish pie, fish scallop, fish cream, fish moulded in a shape and turned out with parsley. The appeal was partly economy and partly presentation, since a dish that arrived at table in a neat dome read as cooking rather than as leftovers. Lining a buttered mould with mashed potato and filling the case belongs to the same family as the raised pie and the timbale, both of which give a soft filling a self-supporting wall.