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Coquilles Of Fish
Take a pint of cold boiled fish, free it of skin and bones, and break it into small pieces. Put it into a saucepan with half a pint of boiling water, a tablespoonful of thick cream, a tablespoonful of butter rolled in flour, a teaspoonful of anchovy sauce, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir all together over the fire until it becomes thoroughly heated, then fill buttered shells with the mixture and cover with fired crumbs. Set in the oven until they become heated. Serve on a napkin.
A Victorian way of using up cold cooked fish: a quick white sauce bound with butter and flour, spooned into scallop shells and browned. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the fish is cooked.
- A pint of fishFish here is measured by volume, not weight. A pint of flaked cooked fish is roughly 10-12 oz, which is what you get from about a pound of raw cod, haddock, salmon or any firm leftover.
- Butter rolled in flourButter worked together with flour into a paste, the same idea as beurre manié. The recipe gives a tablespoonful of butter but does not say how much flour; let the sauce come back to a simmer so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The sauce is thin on purposeThe sauce is loose -- half a pint of water to a pint of fish gives a thin mixture, and the recipe asks only that it be stirred over the fire until thoroughly heated. If it goes into the shells very watery it may separate under the crumbs.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled condiment of anchovy, vinegar and spice, still sold in Britain. A teaspoon of anchovy paste or two mashed fillets, plus a splash of vinegar or lemon, does the same job of salting and sharpening the sauce.
- The shellsReal scallop shells, buttered inside. Small gratin dishes or ramekins of about half a cup work identically. This quantity fills four to six.
- CrumbsThe crumbs should be tossed in butter and lightly coloured in a pan before they go on, since the short time in the oven will not brown them. Alternatively finish under a hot grill for a minute or two.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'set in the oven until they become heated'. The mixture goes in hot, so this is just about setting and colouring the top: a hot oven for a few minutes, or a hot grill, is enough.
- Serve on a napkinShells were conventionally sent to table on a folded napkin. Purely presentational, and easily skipped.
Coquille is simply French for shell. Nineteenth-century English and American versions of the dish used whatever cooked fish was left from an earlier meal rather than scallops. Scallop shells and shell-shaped china dishes were sold for dishes of this kind. The recipe belongs to a family of leftover dishes that Victorian household books treated seriously: fish was often poached whole, so cold boiled fish was a common starting point, and a cook was expected to have ways of turning yesterday's remains into a hot entrée.