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Fish or Poissons (Cream served cold on cro tes)
of fish cream, served cold on croûtes of fried bread, garnished with a cucumber salad and aspic. À l'Alexandra, they are set in red aspic, and are garnished with salad, and little moulds of tomato cream.
Timbale à la Rossini is a steamed mould of fish cream, decorated in divisions with lobster coral and chopped parsley; served with a ragout of lobster, truffle and button mushrooms in the centre.
Soufflé de poisson glacé is an iced fish soufflé.
Petits zéphyrs de poisson are a very light form of little steamed fish soufflés. This name is also frequently given to quenelles of fish.
Croustades de poisson are little cases of pastry, or of fried bread, filled with dressed fish. They are sometimes called Cassolettes.
Talmouses à l'Indienne are tartlets of anchovy pastry filled with curried fish.
Petites caisses à la Pêcheur are china or paper cases filled with dressed fish in white or red sauce, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and lobster coral, and browned.
Pilau de poisson is a fish pilau-dressed with rice, saffron, spice, raisins, etc.
Pâté de poisson à l'Irlandaise is a baked shape of mashed potato filled with fish dressed in white sauce.
Start with the heading, because it is not the name of a dish. This page is a fragment: the text begins in the middle of a sentence, and whoever indexed it took the surviving words as a title.
- The page is broken, and the first entry is lostIt opens of fish cream, served cold on croûtes of fried bread, which is the tail of a sentence whose subject is on the previous page. The dish being described in the first two lines cannot be recovered from what is here, so read it as beginning at Timbale à la Rossini.
- Fish cream is a mousseRaw fish pounded in a mortar, forced through a sieve, lightened with cream and set in a mould. A food processor and a fine sieve do in two minutes what took a mortar, a muscular arm and a tammy cloth, and a modern recipe will call the result a mousse or a quenelle mixture. It is the one technique on the page that has got dramatically easier.
- Lobster coral as a colourUsed here twice, for the red divisions of the Rossini timbale and sprinkled over the petites caisses. It is the roe of a hen lobster, dried and sieved to a powder. You will not find it. Paprika or tomato purée will give the colour and change the taste, and there is no honest substitute for the flavour.
- Five words for a small caseCroustades, cassolettes, caisses, talmouses and zéphyrs all appear, and the page admits the vocabulary is loose: croustades “are sometimes called Cassolettes,” and zéphyr is also used for a quenelle. The terminology looks more precise than it was.
- À l’Irlandaise is fish piePâté de poisson à l’Irlandaise is a baked shape of mashed potato filled with fish in white sauce. It is still cooked weekly in British and Irish kitchens under its own name, and it is the only dish on the page that never needed reviving.
- An iced savourySoufflé de poisson glacé is a frozen fish soufflé. Nothing in modern eating has a place for it. It belonged to a meal long enough and formal enough that a cold savoury course between hot ones made sense, and when the meal shortened the dish had nowhere to go.
What is striking about this page is how much of it can be finished in the morning. Moulds steamed and left to set, creams in cases, pastry croustades, an iced soufflé: nearly every dish is either served cold or assembled in advance and browned at the last minute. That is the signature of a kitchen with one cook and eight courses to produce in sequence, where the only way to survive the evening was to have most of it already done. The elaboration of the fish course is often read as showing off. It is at least as much a scheduling solution.