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Cayenne Pepper (Salt One gill of Stock)
Salt. One gill of Stock.
Two pounds of Bream or John Dory. Four Eggs (hard-boiled). Two Shalots (chopped fine). Two ounces of Butter. Three ounces of Bread-crumbs. Half a teaspoonful of Thyme and Marjoram. One teaspoonful of chopped Parsley. One teaspoonful of Anchovy Sauce. One teaspoonful of Worcester Sauce. Cut the bream in slices. Mix the butter, breadcrumbs, shalot, and seasoning together, and make into small balls. Cut the eggs in quarters. Lay the bream in a pie-dish, and then a layer of egg and seasoning, balls, &c., and, if liked, some pieces of lobster. Cover with a crust of rough puff-paste, and bake in a moderate oven one hour and a half.
Mix the Worcester and anchovy sauce with the stock, and pour into the pie, after it is baked. A glass of Sherry or Chablis may be added.
This is the tail end of a bream pie recipe — the printed page has lost the head of its ingredient list, so quantities for butter, breadcrumbs, shalot and eggs have to be judged. What survives is enough to build the dish, provided a few Victorian conventions are translated.
- The missing ingredientsThe heading and opening lines have been cut off, leaving only "Salt. One gill of Stock." Reasonable working amounts for a family-sized pie: 2 oz butter, 3 oz breadcrumbs, one finely chopped shallot, and three hard-boiled eggs, with a whole bream (or two) filleted and sliced.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a scant two-thirds of a US cup. Fish stock is the obvious choice, though the recipe does not specify.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. The crust wants that hour and a half at most; the pie is really being timed by the pastry, not the fish.
- The fish will overcookNinety minutes reduces sliced bream to cotton wool. Modern practice is to bake until the pastry is deep gold and the filling is bubbling — 40 to 50 minutes for a standard pie-dish — and to cut the fish in thick slices rather than thin so it holds together.
- BreamMost likely sea bream (porgy) rather than the freshwater fish of the same name, though the recipe does not say which. Any firm white fish works: black bream, snapper, hake or a good cod loin.
- ShalotSimply shallot, and it should be chopped very fine — it goes into the forcemeat balls raw and will not soften much inside a butter-and-crumb ball.
- Rough puffA quicker laminated pastry in which lumps of butter are worked into the dough and left in visible flakes, rather than a single block of butter being enclosed as in full puff. Ready-rolled all-butter puff is a fair substitute; brush with egg wash for colour.
- Pouring in the sauceThe hinge of the dish. Cut a small vent in the crust before baking, and pour the warmed stock, Worcestershire and anchovy mixture through it as soon as the pie leaves the oven, while the filling is still drawing liquid in. Poured cold, or onto a cooled pie, it sits on top and makes the pastry sodden.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or dish size; on the amounts suggested above, roughly a 9-inch pie-dish, serving about four to six as a main course.
Fish pies under a raised or puff crust were standard in British cookery long before this book, but the seasoning here suggests the late-Victorian store cupboard: Worcestershire sauce, bottled anchovy sauce and a glass of Sherry poured into a baked pie. Anchovy sauce was a common fish savoury of the period, and Worcestershire had become a widespread sideboard bottle within a couple of generations of its introduction. The layer of quartered hard-boiled egg and the forcemeat balls are older habits, found in the raised pies of the eighteenth century. Sea bream was a comparatively cheap market fish, and the recipe offers lobster as an optional addition.