Fish Croquettes
INGREDIENTS. -Remains of cold fish, egg, bread-crumbs, cayenne, salt; fat for frying.
Flake the fish finely, season it well with cayenne and salt, add an equal quantity of grated bread-crumbs, and make into a paste with beaten eggs. Form into croquettes, dip in egg, then in breadcrumbs, and fry a bright golden brown. TIME.-10 minutes to fry.
SEASONABLE at any time FISH PIE.
Fish and Oyster Pie. (Cold Meat Cookery.)-INGREDIENTS. - Any remains of cold fish, such as cod or haddock; some oysters, either fresh or tinned, pepper and salt to taste, bread-crumbs sufficient for the quantity of fish, 1/4 teaspoonful of finelychopped parsley, cayanne, salt, seasoning. Clear the fish from the bones, and put a layer of it in a pie-dish, which sprinkle with pepper and salt; then a layer of bread-crumbs, oysters and chopped parsley.
Repeat this till the dish is quite full. You may form a covering either of bread-crumbs, which should be browned, or puff-paste, which should be cut into long strips, and laid in cross-bars over the fish, with a line of the paste first laid round the edge. Before putting on the top, pour in some made melted butter, or a little thin white sauce, and the oyster-liquor, and bake.
TIME. If made of cooked fish, 1/4 hour; if made of fresh fish and puff-paste, hour.
SEASONABLE from September to April.
Note. A nice little dish may be made by flaking any cold fish, adding a few oysters, seasoning with pepper and salt, and covering with mashed potatoes; 1 hour will bake it.
Fish Pie, with Tench and Eels. -INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons. -2 tench, 2 eels, 2 onions, a faggot of herbs, 4 blades of mace, 3 anchovies, 1 pint of water, pepper and salt to taste, 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley, the yolks of 4 hard-boiled eggs, puff-paste. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 2d.
Clean and bone the tench, skin and bone the eels, and cut them into pieces 2 inches long, and leave the sides of the tench whole.
Put the bones into a stewpan with the onions, herbs, mace, anchovies, water and 1 hour. Strain it off, put it to cool, and seasoning, and let them simmer gently for skim off all the fat. Lay the tench and eels in a pie-dish, and between each layer put seasoning, chopped parsley, and hardboiled eggs; pour in part of the strained liquor, cover in with puff-paste, and bake for 1/2 hour or rather more. The oven should be rather quick, and when done, heat the remainder of the liquor, which pour into the pie.
TIME hour to bake, or rather more if the oven is slow.
Three related uses for cooked fish, printed as a run-on block in this edition. The croquette recipe is the useful one; the pies are period pieces that need a few adjustments before they work on a modern table.
- Dry the fish firstThe hinge of the croquette is moisture. Flaked cold fish carries a surprising amount of water, and if it is not pressed dry in a cloth the paste will slump in the fat and burst. Chill the shaped croquettes for at least half an hour before crumbing and frying.
- Equal breadcrumbs is too muchAn equal volume of grated crumbs to fish gives a stodgy, bready result by current taste. A quarter to a third the volume of fish, bound with one beaten egg per pound, holds together perfectly well and still tastes of fish.
- Ten minutes is a misprint of intentTen minutes is a long time -- Croquettes of already-cooked fish need only to colour and heat through: about 3 to 4 minutes at 350-375F (175-190C). The book's ten minutes may be meant to cover frying successive batches; taken literally for a single croquette at frying heat it risks drying the interior and darkening the crumb past golden.
- "Grated bread-crumbs"Beeton means stale bread rubbed on a grater — coarse, dry, homemade crumbs, closer to panko than to the fine orange sand sold as breadcrumbs. Dry your own in a low oven if you want the texture she intended.
- "Made melted butter"Not melted butter. In Victorian usage this is a flour-thickened butter sauce, essentially a thin white sauce made with butter, flour and water or milk. Use about 1/2 pint of thin béchamel for a family-sized pie.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures. As a rough modern equivalent, a 'rather quick' oven is around 425-450F (220-230C) and a 'slow' one around 250-300F (120-150C). The fractions in this text have come through damaged: from the surviving wording, the pie times appear to have been half an hour for the fresh-fish version and one hour for the cooked.
- OystersTinned oysters are already cooked and only need warming; fresh ones toughen within a couple of minutes of heat. Add them to the layers raw and let the baking do the work rather than pre-cooking them.
- Tench and eelsTench is a muddy-tasting pond fish rarely sold now. European eel is critically endangered and trade in it is restricted; if you want to make the pie, use a farmed or sustainably sourced substitute and a firm white fish in place of the tench.
- YieldA pound of cooked fish makes roughly eight croquettes, enough for four as a light main course with a sharp sauce. The tench pie is given for four or five.
"Cold Meat Cookery" was a standing heading in Beeton's book: a section devoted entirely to what to do with yesterday's joint or fish, in kitchens where a large piece was cooked for one meal and had to serve several. The croquette — from the French croquer, to crunch — was a genteel solution, since crumbing and frying disguises the fact that the fish has been cooked twice, and the shaping allows a small quantity to be presented as a dish in its own right. The tench-and-eel pie belongs to an older, more rural tradition: both are freshwater fish that could be kept alive in a stew pond or a tub until wanted, and both persist in English cookery well after sea fish became widely available by rail. The seasonable note of September to April on the oyster pie reflects the old rule against oysters in the months without an R, usually explained by the spawning season and the difficulty of keeping them in warm weather.