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Fish in Ramekins
Make a white sauce with two tablespoons of butter, one tablespoon of flour and one cup of hot milk. Season with salt and a little curry powder and mix lightly with about a pound and a half of halibut, which has been boiled and flaked. Fill the dishes and cover with crumbs prepared in the following way:
Melt one-third cup of butter, add one small cup of dried bread crumbs, mix well, and salt and pepper to taste. Set the dishes in the oven to brown the contents and garnish each with a bit of parsley.
A straightforward creamed fish gratin, thickened lightly and baked only long enough to brown. The fish is already cooked, so the oven stage is about the crumb topping.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 400F on an upper rack for 12-15 minutes, until the crumbs are golden and the sauce bubbles at the edges. A longer, cooler bake dries the halibut out with nothing gained.
- The sauce is deliberately thinTwo tablespoons butter to one tablespoon flour is a loose ratio by modern habit, and one cup of milk gives a sauce barely thicker than cream. That is intentional: it has to coat a pound and a half of flaked fish without setting into paste. If you want it firmer, go to two tablespoons flour, but no more.
- RamekinsSmall individual baking dishes. Four 8-ounce dishes or six smaller ones will take this quantity.
- "One small cup" of crumbsAn ambiguous measure; read it as a scant cup, around 3 ounces of dried crumbs. One-third cup of melted butter to that amount gives crumbs that clump slightly rather than pouring loose, which is what browns well.
- Dried bread crumbs, not freshOven-dried crumbs from stale bread. A coarser crumb such as panko browns well here; very fine sandy crumbs can turn dense once buttered.
- Curry powder"a little" here is a warm background seasoning, not a curry. Start with a quarter teaspoon for the cup of sauce and bloom it in the butter before the flour goes in, which removes the raw dustiness.
- Cooking the halibutPoach the fish gently in salted water or milk until it just flakes, then drain well. Wet fish thins the sauce. Any firm white fish or cooked salmon substitutes directly.
- YieldServes four as a main course with bread and a green salad, or six as a first course.
Baking creamed cooked fish under buttered crumbs in individual dishes was a common move in turn-of-the-century American home cooking, and it did two useful things at once: it stretched cooked fish and it let a plain kitchen send something to the table that looked composed. Commercial curry powder had become an ordinary grocery item in English-speaking kitchens by the late nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the era reach for it as a seasoning for fish and eggs rather than as the basis of an Indian dish.