Salmon Pie
Butter a baking-dish, line the sides with a rich biscuit crust. If fresh salmon is used, rinse thoroughly and wipe dry, cut in convenient pieces, and lay it in the dish. Season with salt and pepper, lemon juice, 1 or 2 blades of mace, broken fine, and, if liked, a few drops of onion juice. Pour over the salmon 1 cupful of boiled lobster which has been picked apart and thoroughly mixed with 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter and a teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce.
Cover with the crust, cut a few slits to allow the steam to escape. Bake for an hour in a moderate oven.
Canned salmon may be used instead of the fresh, baking in a quicker oven just long enough to bake the crust.
A late-Victorian fish pie built on a biscuit crust rather than pastry, with lobster used as the enrichment instead of a sauce. The main adjustments are oven temperature and the fact that an hour is far longer than fresh salmon needs.
- Oven temperatures"Moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. The "quicker oven" specified for canned salmon would be hotter, perhaps 400-425F; the recipe asks only that it bake "just long enough to bake the crust," which is likely 20-25 minutes.
- An hour is too longAn hour at 350F will take fresh salmon well past dry. Cut the fish in pieces no thicker than an inch and check at 30-35 minutes; the crust and the fish finish at about the same time if the pieces are not oversized.
- Biscuit crust, not pastryA "rich biscuit crust" of this period would be a chemically leavened dough (baking powder or soda) with a fairly generous proportion of fat; the recipe gives no proportions or thickness. It lines the sides only, so the bottom of the dish is left bare and the fish juices are not trapped under dough.
- Mace bladesWhole mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as dried blades. A blade is often reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon ground, so two broken fine is roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon; ground is a fair substitute but use a light hand, as it disperses more strongly.
- Onion juiceMade by halving an onion and pressing it against a grater or citrus reamer. The recipe asks for only a few drops, so very little is needed.
- The lobster layerA cupful of picked cooked lobster is about 6 oz of meat, or the yield of one small lobster. It is already cooked, so it only needs warming through; keep the pieces large so they do not shred into the salmon.
- YieldA pie in a 1 1/2 to 2 quart dish, serving four to six as a main course. Let it stand ten minutes before cutting so the crust holds together.