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Four Button Mushrooms
Four small Quenelles.
One gill of Béchamel Sauce.
One yolk of Egg.
Put the slice of cod on a greased tin, cover with a greased paper and bake in a slow oven for about fifteen minutes. Reduce the wine in a stewpan, add the sauce with the yolk of egg mixed in it, the oysters blanched, the mushrooms and the quenelles, and season to taste. Place the slice of fish on a dish, pour the sauce over, and place the oysters, mushrooms, and quenelles in groups in the corners of the dish.
What survives here is the tail of a longer entry: the title and opening lines are ingredient quantities, and the cod slice, wine and oysters are named in the method but never listed. Read it as a garnished baked cod steak with a yolk-enriched béchamel, and fill the gaps yourself.
- The missing ingredient listReconstruct it as one thick cod steak (6-8 oz), a wineglass of dry white wine (about 1/4 cup), four oysters, four button mushrooms, four small quenelles, a gill of béchamel and one egg yolk. Quantities for fish and wine are genuinely absent from the text, not merely vague.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 142 ml (a generous half cup). That is a modest amount of sauce, correct for a single portion plated with garnishes in the corners of the dish.
- Slow oven300F/150C. Fifteen minutes suits a steak of about an inch under greased paper; the paper is doing the work of foil, keeping the surface from drying.
- The hinge: never boil the liaisonOnce the yolk goes into the béchamel the sauce must stay below a simmer. Reduce the wine first, take the pan off direct heat, then stir the yolk-enriched sauce in and warm it gently or it will curdle into threads.
- Blanching the oystersThirty seconds to a minute in their own liquor, just until the edges ruffle. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber before they ever reach the plate.
- Button mushroomsIn this period these were small unopened white caps, often cooked in a little lemon water to keep them pale. Trim them level so they sit upright in their group on the dish.
- QuenellesPoached forcemeat dumplings, most likely fish here (a white fish such as whiting or sole, pounded and bound with panada and egg), though veal or chicken quenelles were also used as garnish. Shape them small, in teaspoons, and poach in barely trembling salted water until they float and firm.
- YieldOne serving. Scale by the steak: a gill of sauce and four of each garnish per person.
This reads as cookery-school writing, of the sort produced for training classes and for households running a cook: the dish is a plain baked cod steak lifted into a "dressed fish" by a wine-reduced bechamel and three separate garnishes arranged in groups. The oyster-and-mushroom combination recalls the French normande manner, where cider or white wine, oysters and cream dress a white fish, and the quenelle is straight out of the French professional repertoire that British cookery schools were busy naturalising. The arithmetic of the recipe is telling - four oysters, four mushrooms, four quenelles - because it is written for single plated portions rather than a family platter.