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Cheese and Halibut Scallop
Have 2 cupfuls of cold cooked halibut, flaked coarsely with a fork. Make a good white sauce by cooking together a tablespoonful of drawn butter with 1 of flour, and when nicely blended add a pint of rich milk. Season, and pour slowly upon the well-beaten yolks of 2 eggs.
Fill a bake-dish with alternate layers of the fish, sauce, and very mild grated cheese, using altogether about 4 tablespoonfuls of the cheese. Cover the top with crumbs, bake for thirty minutes in a hot oven, and serve hot. About ten minutes before serving remove the cover, and brown.
A late-Victorian fish gratin, built on a thin egg-enriched white sauce rather than a heavy cheese one. The sauce is where it succeeds or curdles.
- Temper the yolks off the heatPour the hot sauce into the beaten yolks in a thin stream while whisking, not the reverse, and do not return the mixture to a boil afterward. Poured too fast or reheated, the yolks scramble and the finished dish will be grainy.
- "Drawn butter"Here it simply means melted butter. In other books of the period drawn butter is a finished butter-and-flour sauce; in this instruction the butter and flour are cooked together, so plain melted butter is meant.
- The sauce is very thinOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint (2 cups) of milk gives a barely thickened sauce; the egg yolks do most of the setting. If you want a gratin that holds a spoon mark, 2 tablespoons each is closer to modern practice.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" in period cookbooks is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-450F, with no single fixed figure. With egg yolks in the sauce, the lower end is safer, and dropping to 375-400F for the covered stretch will help keep the custard from breaking.
- Covered, then brownedCover the dish for the first twenty minutes, then uncover for the last ten to brown the crumbs. Buttering the crumbs first, about a tablespoon to a cup, gives an even colour instead of dry spots.
- "Very mild grated cheese"A young American cheddar or a mild Monterey Jack matches the intent. Four tablespoons across the whole dish is a seasoning quantity, not a cheese sauce, so anything sharp or aged will bury the halibut.
- Cold cooked halibutTwo cupfuls of flakes is roughly 3/4 lb of cooked fish, from about 1 lb raw. Poached or steamed halibut works best; leftover grilled fish carries char flavour that fights the mild cheese.
- YieldFills a 1 1/2-quart baking dish; enough for about four modest servings with bread and a green salad, or two to three as a substantial main.
Scallops of this kind, meaning layered baked dishes finished with crumbs, were a standard American answer to cooked fish left from an earlier meal, and turn-of-the-century compilations carry many of them. The name is usually traced to the scallop shell once used as the baking vessel rather than to the shellfish itself, which is offered as the reason oysters, potatoes and halibut all end up "scalloped" -- though the derivation is not settled. Halibut suited the format well: its firm, low-fat flesh flakes into large pieces that hold their shape under sauce rather than collapsing into paste. The egg yolks stirred into the white sauce mark this as a slightly genteel version, closer to a fish custard than to the plain flour-thickened scallops of household cookery.