Scalloped Fish
Use what is left from the baked or boiled fish served at dinner. Remove the bones and skin, break in pieces, mix with it the dressing and sauce, if any. Arrange in a baking dish with alternate layers of cracker crumbs, using butter, pepper and salt, as needed. Have crumbs come to the top, and moisten with milk, using less if there is sauce. Bake until brown and serve at once for luncheon or supper.
A frugal use-it-up dish with no measurements, no oven temperature and no timing, which is typical of the period. The proportions below are a working starting point, not a correction of the original.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none, only "bake until brown." A moderate to fairly hot oven, roughly 375-400F, suits the dish; at 375F a shallow 1 1/2-quart dish should take about 25-30 minutes, until the top is browned and the milk is bubbling at the edges.
- Working proportionsAbout 2 cups flaked cooked fish to 1 to 1 1/2 cups cracker crumbs, 2-3 tablespoons butter dotted between layers, and 1/2 to 3/4 cup milk. If leftover cream sauce or dressing goes in, cut the milk to a few tablespoons or the dish will be soupy.
- Cracker crumbsThese are plain soda or water crackers crushed coarse, not fine dry breadcrumbs and not seasoned crumbs from a canister. Coarse crumbs hold their texture; fine ones turn to paste under the milk. Unsalted crackers let you control the seasoning.
- Which fishAny firm baked or boiled leftover works: cod, haddock, halibut, salmon, bluefish. Very oily smoked fish will dominate. Go over the flakes twice for pin bones, since baked fish leaves plenty behind.
- The layer that mattersCrumbs on top, as the original insists, and butter them well. That buttered crust is the only browning in the dish; an unbuttered top just dries out pale.
- Reheating leftoversUse fish cooked no more than two days earlier and kept cold, and bake until the center is hot through rather than merely warm. Because the milk is added cold and the dish is dense, the middle lags well behind the browned top.
- YieldThe proportions above serve three to four as the light luncheon or supper dish the book intends, alongside bread and a salad.
Scalloped anything, in nineteenth-century American cookery, meant a dish layered with crumbs and butter, moistened, and baked until brown; the same formula covers scalloped oysters, potatoes, tomatoes and cold meat, and the word is generally traced to the shell in which such mixtures were once baked. Its appearance under Fish here suggests that the household cookbooks of this era took the second appearance of a dish seriously, though the recipe itself says only "use what is left," and any fuller story of a whole fish served at dinner and returning at supper is inference rather than documented practice. Cracker crumbs rather than breadcrumbs are often taken as an American touch, soda and water crackers being a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple in a way that commercial bread was not.