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Fish Left-Overs
For fish réchauffés it is absolutely necessary to have a thorough knowledge of sauces. Stews and fricassees are foods that have been cooked in a sauce, and they are excellent methods for reheating fish. When fish leftovers come from the table, pick them over carefully before they cool and become gelatinized. Reject every bone, layers of fat or dark meat, and flake the eatable portions neatly. Put in a bowl, cover closely, and set in the refrigerator till required. Generally a fish réchauffé with a sauce calls for a small amount of fish stock. To obtain this, put the bones and poor pieces of fish--not the skin or fatinto a small saucepan, cover with cold water, allow to simmer slowly for a few minutes, then strain and cool.
Never add salt to any fish without tasting, as it is very easy to overseason it. Croquettes are an excellent method for using up scraps of fish, especially salmon or any whitefleshed fish. When heated in a sauce, it can be served in ramequins or large scallop shells which are sold by the dozen in crockery stores. With a crust of brown crumbs, these individual dishes are very attractive. Delicious curries, soups, and deviled dishes may be prepared from cold fish. It can be combined with mashed potatoes and crumbs in a pie; it makes a tempting soufflé or excellent timbales, and may be used with cold potatoes for a relishing hash. Save even a few spoonfuls of any sauce accompanying fish. Half a cupful egg, tomato, shrimp, oyster, or plain white sauce adds much to the flavor of fresh sauce used for reheating a dish. If the amount of fish is scant, add 2 or 3 hard-boiled eggs, using them as a garnish or cutting the white in rings and squeezing the yolk through a potato ricer and sifting it over the top of the dish. Sometimes there are small left-overs of cooked oysters or clams. If the oysters are in a milk stew, strain off the liquor and save it.
It may be enriched by a spoonful of butter or cupful cream. Season well and heat in the double boiler, then add the oysters, but only just long enough to heat them. More than a minute will overcook them. Oysters or clams which have been cooked in any way may be deviled, curried, or used in rissoles or chops. Chop coarsely a cupful cold scalloped oysters with a well-beaten egg and shape into croquettes. Flour, egg, crumb, and fry. Lobster meat can be utilized in almost any receipt that calls for that excellent shellfish, or converted into delicate lobster soup.
The smallest amount of fish or shellfish can be utilized for a sauce to accompany baked fish, lobster, oyster, and shrimp being most suitable.
Fish Bisque. 2 cupfuls cold fish, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful parsley, 1 teaspoonful Sauce, Worcestershire 1 quart white or chicken stock, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 2 cupfuls hot milk, 2 tablespoonfuls cracker crumbs, ½ teaspoonful salt, Dash cayenne.
Mince the fish, add to it the butter, chopped parsley, Worcestershire Sauce, and stock. Bind with the but- MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK ter and flour cooked together. Add the milk, cracker crumbs and seasonings.
Salmon Loaf. 2 cupfuls salmon, 1 cupful stale bread crumbs, 1 teaspoonful onion juice, 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley, 3 eggs.
Flake the salmon fine, mix with the bread crumbs and seasonings, and moisten with the well-beaten eggs.
Pack into a buttered mold and steam for two hours. Serve hot. Any leftover of this dish may be broken into small pieces, then served with mayonnaise; it makes a palatable salad. Halibut Boudins. cupful cold mashed potato, 1 cupful cold halibut, cupful soft bread crumbs, teaspoonful pepper, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 egg, teaspoonful onion juice.
Mash the halibut, mix well with the other ingredients, and press through a potato ricer. Moisten with the beaten egg. Butter Dario molds and dust them with fine bread crumbs.
Fill each mold with the fish mixture, set them in a pan of hot water, and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve on a hot platter, pour a white sauce over them, and garnish with slices of hard-boiled egg.
Kedgeree. 1 cupful cold rice, 1 cupful cold flaked fish, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 egg, Salt and pepper.
Into a double boiler put the rice and fish and let them grow quite hot, stirring lightly so the fish may not break and the mixture grow pasty.
When hot, add the butter, the egg unbeaten, salt, and pepper. Stir till well blended, and serve.
Halibut Ramequins. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, cupful cream, cupful fish stock, 2 cupfuls cold flaked halibut, Yolk 1 egg.
Make a white sauce from the butter, flour, cream, and fish stock. Pepper and salt to taste. Add the flaked fish and egg beaten thick. Pour into ramequins and cover the top with buttered crumbs. On top lay a ring of hard-boiled white of egg, and inside each a sprig of water cress. Fish Friandises. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 cupful scalded milk, 1 egg, 2 cupfuls cold fish, 1½ cupfuls buttered crumbs.
Make a sauce of the butter, flour, and milk. When it thickens, add the well-beaten egg. Take the remains of cold baked or boiled white-flcshed fish and separate it into flakes. Put a thin layer of butter crumbs into the bottom of a baking dish, cover with the flaked fish, sprinkle with salt, paprika, and nutmeg. Pour in a layer of sauce, then fish. Alternate in this fashion till the dish is filled, and cover with buttered crumbs.
Bake for twenty minutes.
Curried Salmon. onion, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful curry powder, 1 cupful hot water, tablespoonful flour, tablespoonful tomato catsup, Salt and pepper to taste, 1 cupful cold salmon.
Fry the onion brown in the butter, sift in the curry and flour, pour the water in slowly, and stir till smooth.
Add the seasoning, and last the salmon. Serve hot with toast. Salmon Croquettes.
FISH LEFT-OVERS 3 cupfuls cold salmon, 1 cupful cream, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, tablespoonful flour, 1 egg, Pepper and salt.
Chop the salmon well, and make a white sauce from the butter, flour, and cream. Cook and beat till smooth and creamy, then add the salmon and seasonings. Just before taking from the fire, add 1 well-beaten egg, and spread on a buttered plate. When quite cool, roll into small croquettes with flattened ends, flour, egg, crumb, and fry in deep boiling lard.
Lobster Croquettes.
A cupful chopped lobster, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful mustard, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, cupful cream sauce.
Stir the lobster and seasonings into the hot cream sauce and spread on a plate to cool. Shape into tiny pyramids. Into the small end of each croquette stick a few inches of macaroni or a lobster claw. Fry in deep fat. Garnish with parsley or water cress.
Fish Puff Balls. 1 cupful cold flaked fish, 1 tablespoonful butter, cupful flour, 1 cupful boiling milk, 2 eggs, Pepper and salt.
Make a white sauce with the milk, flour, and butter. Season with pepper and salt. When it has thickened, stir in the fish, then the well-beaten eggs. Fry a tablespoonful at a time in smoking hot fat, fritter fashion.
A compendium of ways to use cooked fish, built on the assumption that the cook already has a white sauce in hand. The hinge for all of it is temperature: the fish is already cooked, so every one of these dishes is a reheating job, not a cooking job.
- Cold fish is a short-life ingredientCooked fish should be flaked, covered and refrigerated promptly and used within a day or two; it will not keep as forgivingly as cold roast meat. Anything with an off or ammoniac smell goes in the bin rather than into a sauce, where seasoning will mask it.
- Dropped fractions in the quantitiesSeveral ingredient lines begin with a bare "cupful" or "tablespoonful" where a fraction has gone missing, and the curry starts with an unnumbered onion. The missing figures cannot be recovered from the printed text; a half is the likeliest guess in each case, but treat any reconstruction as conjecture and adjust by eye and taste.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is usually rendered as about 350F, and the halibut boudins are the only dish here given an oven description: twenty minutes at that heat in their water bath. The fish friandises are given no temperature at all, only a twenty-minute bake; as a shallow gratin of already-cooked food they need only long enough to heat through and brown.
- Oysters and clamsThe instruction to heat oysters no more than a minute is correct and worth obeying. Any longer and they shrink and turn rubbery. The same applies to lobster meat stirred into a hot sauce.
- The egg in the kedgereeAn unbeaten egg stirred into hot rice and fish over a double boiler may not reach a temperature that pasteurises it. Keep the pan over the heat and stir until the mixture is steaming and visibly thickened, or use pasteurised egg if serving anyone vulnerable.
- Frying fat and temperatureThe book gives no figures. "Deep boiling lard" indicates fat hot enough for deep frying, in the region of 375F; "smoking hot fat" implies hotter still. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works; croquettes bound with a cream sauce must be thoroughly chilled and firm before they are floured, egged and crumbed, or they will burst.
- Dario molds and ramequinsDariole molds are small cylindrical timbale molds, about 4 fl oz; ovenproof espresso cups or muffin tins substitute. Ramekins here are simply individual baking dishes, as they still are.
- Salt and the stockThe warning against salting fish before tasting matters most with the fish stock, which concentrates as it reduces, and with fish that has already been salted or brined. Simmer the trimmings only a few minutes, as the recipe directs; long boiling of fish bones is generally held to turn the stock bitter.
- YieldsNo servings are given. These are small dishes; the two-cup recipes will serve about four as a light course, fewer as a main. The salmon loaf, steamed two hours, is the one that most repays being made in quantity.
Reheated fish was a test of a cook's economy, and the vocabulary here shows how thoroughly the American middle-class kitchen had borrowed French terms to dignify the exercise: réchauffé simply means warmed up, friandises means dainties, boudins here means a molded shape rather than a sausage. Kedgeree is the exception, an Anglo-Indian dish of rice and fish generally traced to the Hindustani khichri, which came back to Britain with returning colonial households and reached American cookbooks as a breakfast dish. The advice to keep the bones and poor pieces of fish—though not the skin or fat—for stock, to save even half a cup of yesterday's sauce, and to stretch scant fish with hard-boiled eggs belongs to a period when a household bought whole fish and expected the cook to account for every part of it. The reference to "McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce" by brand, and to scallop shells sold by the dozen at crockery stores, places the book firmly in the era of national branded groceries and the fashion for individual portions served in shells and ramekins.