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Fish with Mashed Potato
Take any cold fish, either boiled, baked, or fried. Free from all skin and bones, flake into medium-sized pieces. Butter a baking-dish; line the bottom and sides with smoothly mashed potato, that is well seasoned and beaten light with one lightly beaten egg. Leave the potato quite thick around the edges of the pan, and do not smooth it on top, but leave as rough as possible. Add to the flaked fish one-half as much bread crumbs and moisten with white sauce or any fish sauce that may be left over; season with salt and pepper and a teaspoonful of Worcestershire or chili sauce; fill the space left in the middle of the potato, dot the top of the potato with bits of butter, and bake in a hot oven for fifteen minutes, or until the potato is nicely browned. Serve in the same dish.
Remnants of cold meat may be treated in the same way. The fish or meat should have enough sauce or gravy to make it quite moist, and should be quite highly seasoned.
A leftovers dish that works on the same principle as a fish pie, with the potato as a crust rather than a lid. The success of it turns on the moisture of the filling and the roughness of the potato.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as roughly 400-450F. Everything in the dish is already cooked; the fifteen minutes are only to heat it through and brown the potato peaks.
- Leave the top roughThe instruction not to smooth the potato is the point of the dish. Ridges and peaks catch the butter and crisp; a smoothed surface just dries out pale.
- Moisture is the hingeCold flaked fish plus dry breadcrumbs will bake into a solid mass. The mixture should look distinctly loose and sauced before it goes into the potato shell -- roughly the consistency of a thick stew.
- White sauce quantityNo amount is given. For about 2 cups of flaked fish and 1 cup of crumbs, count on 3/4 to 1 cup of sauce.
- The egg in the potatoOne beaten egg per batch of mashed potato stiffens the walls so they hold their shape against the filling. Beat it in while the potato is warm but not hot enough to scramble it.
- Cold fish, kept coldCooked fish held in the refrigerator should be used within two days, and the finished dish wants to come out of the oven steaming hot in the centre, not merely browned on top.
- SeasoningThe direction to season highly is honest advice: chilled cooked fish is bland, and the sauce dilutes it further. Taste the filling before it goes in the dish.
- YieldAt the quantities suggested above, a 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish would serve three or four as a main course; the recipe itself specifies neither.
Recipes of this kind fill the back pages of late nineteenth and early twentieth century household books, where the ability to turn yesterday's boiled cod into today's supper was a measured domestic virtue rather than a novelty. The construction -- a shell of mashed potato holding a sauced filling -- is the same one behind fish pie, shepherd's pie and cottage pie, and the note here that "remnants of cold meat may be treated in the same way" makes the kinship explicit. The Worcestershire and chili sauce are a period signature: bottled sauces became cheap and ubiquitous in Anglo-American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks leaned on them to give leftover food the sharpness it had lost overnight.