Fish au Gratin
3 lbs. fish 2 cups White Sauce No. 1 1/2 cup cracker crumbs 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 2 tablespoons chopped parsley The fish should be freed from skin and bone and broken into little flanks. Melt the butter and combine with cracker crumbs. Butter a baking dish and place alternate layers of fish and cracker crumbs, moisten with sauce and sprinkle with seasonings, sprinkle buttered crumbs over the top and bake in a quick oven for ten or fifteen minutes.
A leftover dish dressed up: cooked fish, white sauce and cracker crumbs, browned fast in a hot oven. The measurements are straightforward, but two things need translating before you start.
- The fish must already be cookedTen to fifteen minutes only heats the dish through and colours the top. This recipe assumes the 3 lb of fish is boiled or baked leftovers, skinned, boned and flaked. Raw fillets will not cook safely in that time under a blanket of sauce.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F in modern terms. The point is to brown the crumb topping before the sauce breaks or the fish dries out, so preheat fully and set the dish on an upper rack.
- White Sauce No. 1A cross-reference to the book's own white sauce, not reproduced on this page. A conventional white sauce of this period runs somewhere between 1 and 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk, with a little salt; check the book's own entry, since numbered sauces often run from thin to thick. Make it slightly loose, as it thickens again in the oven.
- Cracker crumbsSoda crackers or saltines crushed fine, not the sweetened or heavily seasoned crackers sold now. Panko or dried breadcrumbs work, but reduce the added salt, since crackers carry their own.
- "Little flanks"Almost certainly a misprint for "flakes". Break the fish into generous pieces along its natural grain; shredded fish turns pasty once the sauce is on it.
- Buttered crumbsThe recipe melts the butter into the crumbs in one step and lists only the half cup, so it is unclear whether the interior layers were meant to be dry; as written, all the crumbs are buttered and some are reserved for the top.
- Yield3 lb of cooked fish plus sauce should serve six to eight. Use a dish large enough to hold it without heaping -- three pounds of flakes plus two cups of sauce is more than 2 quarts -- and keep it shallow, or the centre will still be cool when the top is brown.
Au gratin in its original French sense means nothing more than a browned crust, whether from crumbs, cheese or both, and in American domestic cookery of this period the phrase had become shorthand for anything baked under buttered crumbs in a white sauce. The dish solves the practical problem of yesterday's boiled cod or halibut, and the white sauce that binds it is built on a flour roux.