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Salt and Cayenne (Take the roes out)
Take the roes out of the bloaters and put them on one side; pound the flesh of the fish in a mortar with the butter, egg, and seasoning, and pass through a wire sieve. Put a little heap of this mixture on each croûton, with a piece of the roes on the top; bake for ten minutes in a moderate oven and serve very hot.
Cassolettes à l'Albany.
Cut some croûtes of bread three inches long and one inch wide, cut out the middle and fry the croûtes a nice brown. Have two ounces of anchovy or bloater paste; cut in pieces three soft roes of bloaters, six oysters cut in four. Sauté these all together in one ounce of butter, two drops of lemon-juice and cayenne; then fill in the cassolettes. Prepare some buttered egg mixture not too much cooked, and pour a teaspoonful over each cassolette. Serve hot.
Two Edwardian savouries for the end of dinner, both built on bloaters — whole herring, salted and cold-smoked, split down to the roe. The quantities for the first are not given in the text as it stands, so treat it as a method and scale by taste.
- BloatersA bloater is a whole ungutted herring, lightly salted and cold-smoked, so the roe stays inside. Whole smoked herring or kippers are the nearest substitute; kippers are split and saltier, so cut back any added salt. If you cannot get soft roes in the fish, tinned or frozen herring roes sold as "soft roes" work for the garnish.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F/175C. Ten minutes sets the butter-and-egg paste and warms the croûtons through. Bloaters are cold-smoked rather than cooked, so this short bake is what cooks the paste and the egg in it; much longer only dries the fish out.
- Croûtons and croûtesBoth mean fried or toasted bread here, not the small cubes sold in bags. For the cassolettes, cut bread 3 x 1 inches and about ¾ inch thick, hollow out the centre to leave a shallow case with walls, and fry in clarified butter or oil until evenly brown.
- Passing through a sieveThe pounded fish, butter and egg are forced through a wire sieve to remove skin, bone and sinew. A food processor followed by a single push through a fine sieve gets you there faster and gives the same smooth, spreadable paste.
- The oystersSix oysters cut in four and tossed in butter need well under two minutes — just until the edges ruffle. Held on the heat with the roes and paste they turn rubbery, and the residual heat of the filling will finish them.
- Buttered eggThis is soft scrambled egg, stirred over low heat with plenty of butter and pulled off while still loose. "Not too much cooked" is the point: it has to pour off a teaspoon over the hot filling.
- SeasoningBloaters, anchovy paste and oysters are all salty. Season the pounded mixture at the end, and lean on the cayenne and lemon rather than the salt.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many cases to cut; 2 oz of paste, three roes and six oysters will fill roughly six to eight small ones — one or two a head as a savoury course, or a plate of canapés for four.
The savoury course — something hot, small and sharply seasoned served after the sweet — was a fixture of British formal dinners from the later nineteenth century until the Second World War, and books of this kind carry dozens of them. Bloaters were the cheap end of the Great Yarmouth herring trade, cured only lightly so they kept a matter of days, and their soft roes were prized well out of proportion to the price of the fish. Dressing them up on fried bread with butter, egg and cayenne, and pinning a French name to the result, is exactly the movement of high-Victorian and Edwardian professional cookery: a herring becomes a cassolette. "À l'Albany" is the sort of dedication cooks attached to a club, a hotel or a patron, and such names were coined freely rather than fixed by any authority.