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Fish a la Provencale
1/4 cup butter 2 1/2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk Yolks 4 "hard-boiled" eggs 1 teaspoon Anchovy sauce 2 cups cold boiled flaked fish Make a sauce of butter, flour, and milk. Mash yolks of eggs and mix with Anchovy essence, add to sauce, then add fish. Serve as soon as heated. Serve on pieces of toasted Graham bread.
Welsh Rarebit I 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon corn-starch 1/2 cup thin cream 1/2 lb. soft mild cheese cut in small pieces 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon mustard Few grains cayenne Toast or wafer crackers Melt butter, add corn-starch, and stir until well mixed, then add cream gradually, while stirring constantly, and cook two minutes. Add cheese, and stir until cheese is melted. Season, and serve on zephyrettes or bread toasted on one side, rarebit being poured over untoasted side. Much of the success of a rarebit depends upon the quality of the cheese. A rarebit should be smooth and of a creamy consistency, never stringy.
A creamed-fish entree built on a plain white sauce, enriched with mashed hard-boiled yolks and sharpened with anchovy. It is a way of using up cooked fish, and it stands or falls on the quality of that fish.
- The hinge: heat gently, brieflyThe fish is already cooked, so the dish only needs warming through — two or three minutes over low heat. Held longer, the flakes break down and the yolk-thickened sauce turns grainy.
- Anchovy sauce vs. anchovy essenceThe ingredient list says "Anchovy sauce" and the method says "Anchovy essence"; both were bottled anchovy condiments of the period, essence generally being the more concentrated. Modern anchovy paste is the closest substitute for essence — start with half a teaspoon and taste, as its strength and salt level may differ from the old bottled sauces.
- Quantities and the sauceA quarter cup butter to 2 1/2 tablespoons flour is a fat-heavy roux; the sauce will be loose rather than stiff, which suits the dish. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish works — cod, haddock, halibut. Cold leftover poached or baked fish is the intent. Flake it in generous pieces and fold rather than stir, so it does not become paste.
- Egg yolksMash the four cooked yolks smooth with a fork before they go near the sauce; lumps of yolk will not disperse once the sauce is warm. The whites are not used here and can go into a salad.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf named for Sylvester Graham. Any dense whole-wheat bread, toasted firm enough not to collapse under the sauce, serves the purpose.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed, on the assumption that the anchovy carries the salt. Taste before serving and add white pepper and a little lemon, which the recipe omits but the dish wants.
- YieldTwo cups of fish in two cups of sauce serves four as a light entree, or three if it is the main dish.
Dishes labelled à la Provençale normally signal tomato, garlic and olive oil, and this one has none of those — an example of how loosely French kitchen tags were applied in American and English domestic cookery around 1900, where the phrase often meant little more than "dressed up." What the recipe really belongs to is the large family of creamed-and-served-on-toast entrees that filled the middle of turn-of-the-century menus: a white sauce, something cooked and cold from the day before, and a savoury note from a bottle. Anchovy sauce and anchovy essence were standard pantry bottles in that period, used much as Worcestershire is now. The Graham bread specified points to the health-reform current running through American cookery of the era, which favoured coarse whole-meal loaves over white.