Fish Casserole
Remove the skin and bones from 1/2 pound of cooked fish and break the fish into small pieces.
Rub ¼ pound of mashed potatoes through a sieve, mix it with the fish, add pepper and salt to taste. Melt 1 tablespoonful of butter in saucepan, add to it the fish mixture, mix well, and stir in I well-beaten egg, 1 tablespoonful of milk and 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley, pour the mixture into a buttered casserole dish, cover with crumbs. Bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes, turn out, garnish with parsley and lemon and serve.
A thrifty way to stretch leftover cooked fish with potato, closer to a baked fish loaf than to what most people now mean by a casserole. It is straightforward, but a few of the quantities and terms need translating.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. Thirty minutes is enough to set the egg and brown the crumbs, since everything in the dish is already cooked.
- The potato quantityThe printed page was checked: the mashed potato is a quarter pound, about 4 oz against the half pound of fish. That gives a soft, fish-heavy mixture; using more potato, up to roughly equal weights, gives a firmer one that turns out more reliably.
- "Casserole dish" hereThe instruction to turn it out means a plain deep dish or a small loaf tin, well buttered, not a wide gratin dish. Line the base with a disc of parchment if you want it to release cleanly.
- Which fishAny cooked white fish or leftover poached salmon works. Smoked haddock is good but salt it lightly, as the fish already carries salt.
- Sieving the potatoPushing the mash through a sieve, or using a ricer, is what keeps the mixture smooth rather than gluey. Do not beat cooked potato in a processor; it turns to paste.
- Warming the mixtureThe butter and fish mixture only wants to be warmed through in the pan. Let it cool slightly before the beaten egg goes in, or the egg will scramble in streaks.
- CrumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with a little melted butter brown far better than plain fresh crumbs and stop the top drying out.
- YieldAs written, two modest servings, or four as a first course with the lemon and parsley.
Recipes of this kind turn on making a Friday's boiled cod reappear on Saturday without looking like leftovers. The binding of flaked fish with sieved potato, egg and a spoonful of milk is the same mixture that becomes fishcakes when fried, and the choice to bake and turn it out instead reflects a period fondness for moulded dishes that could be garnished and brought to table whole. The word casserole was then still shifting in English usage from the vessel itself, borrowed from French, to the food cooked in it, which is why the recipe has to specify a casserole dish at all.