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Trout with Potatoes
1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley 3 large potatoes 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) cream Salt and pepper 1 egg white Oyster sauce Boil the trout in boiling salted water for twenty minutes or until ready; when cold, bone it and flake it, and lay it in a well-buttered fireproof dish; bring the milk and parsley to the boil and pour them over the fish; boil the potatoes, then mash them with the butter, cream, salt, and pepper, spread them over the fish, smooth the surface, then mark it in fancy design with a fork; place the casserole in a hot oven for ten minutes. Remove it from the oven, beat up the white of the egg stiffly, brush it over the top of the potatoes, and continue to bake for fifteen minutes.
Serve hot with the oyster sauce. The sauce may be served in an earthenware gravy boat.
A fish pie under a piped potato crust, written when "casserole" still meant the fireproof vessel rather than the dish cooked in it. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the trout is not quantified, and the oyster sauce is not the bottled Cantonese condiment.
- Oyster sauceIn an English cookbook of this vintage this means a white sauce enriched with poached oysters and their liquor, not the dark bottled Chinese sauce. Substituting the modern product will overwhelm the fish.
- How much troutThe recipe never says. The other quantities suit one large trout or two small ones, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb whole, yielding about 12 oz of flaked cooked flesh. Serves three to four.
- Twenty minutes is too longTrout of that size poaches through in 8 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer, and the flesh flakes cleanly once it has cooled. Twenty minutes at a rolling boil leaves it dry and shredded, which matters less here than in a plain preparation but still costs flavour.
- The measuresThe recipe glosses its own units: 1/2 pint is 1 cup, 1/4 pint is 1/2 cup. These match American cup equivalents rather than the imperial pint, so follow the bracketed figures. Two heaping tablespoonfuls of butter is given as 2 oz, about 4 tablespoons in modern terms.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" of the period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 425-450F. The first ten minutes sets the potato; the second stage, after the egg white goes on, browns and puffs it.
- The milk and parsleyBringing the milk to a boil with the parsley and pouring it straight over the flaked fish is the only moistening the base gets. Season it before it goes in, and do not let the potato layer sink into it -- spread it in spoonfuls from the edges inward.
- Egg white glazeStiffly beaten white brushed over potato gives a pale, crisp, slightly meringued crust rather than the golden one you get from yolk or butter. If you want colour, that is the change to make, but it is a different finish from the one intended.
- VesselA shallow gratin dish of about 1 1/2 quarts gives the ratio of crust to fish the recipe assumes. A deep casserole leaves the interior wet at the point the top is browned.
Fireproof earthenware and enamelled iron became cheap and widely available in British and American kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, and cooking, serving and washing up in a single vessel had an obvious appeal. The dish itself is an ordinary fish pie of the kind that had been made with cod, haddock or salmon for generations, dressed up for the new cookware with a forked pattern in the potato and an egg-white glaze. Trout was the respectable freshwater choice, and oyster sauce -- a cream sauce with poached oysters, standard alongside boiled fish and boiled fowl in nineteenth-century English cookery -- marks the recipe as aspiring to something better than nursery food. The author suggests serving the sauce in an earthenware gravy boat: the new ware was to be brought to the table, not hidden in the kitchen.