Sole or Cod Pie
INGREDIENTS for pie for 4 persons. -1 lb. of cold boiled sole or cod, seasoning to taste, of pepper, salt and pounded mace, 1 dozen oysters, 3 tablespoonfuls of white stock, 1 teacupful of cream thickened with flour, puff-paste.
AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold fish, 1s. 6d.
Clear the fish from the bones, lay it in a pie-dish, and between the layers put a few oysters and a little seasoning; add the stock, and, when liked, a small quantity of butter; cover with puff-paste and bake for 1/2 hour. Boil the cream with sufficient flour to thicken it; pour in the pie, and serve.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A leftovers dish: cold poached fish given a second life under puff pastry, with a thickened cream sauce poured in at the end. The sequence matters more than the quantities.
- The hinge: sauce goes in after bakingThe cream is boiled with flour separately and poured into the finished pie, not baked with it. Cut a small vent in the pastry before baking, then pour the hot sauce through it as soon as the pie leaves the oven, tilting the dish so it works down between the layers.
- Oven heatBeeton gives no temperature. Puff pastry wants a hot oven, 425F/220C, for the full half hour; anything slower and the layers slump rather than lift. The filling is already cooked, so the bake is entirely about the crust.
- A teacupfulIn Victorian usage usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, roughly 150 ml, though the measure was never standardised. Thicken it with a scant tablespoon of flour, cooked out for a minute or two, or the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- White stockBeeton's white stock is a pale veal or poultry broth. A light chicken stock works, though fish stock suits the pie better; three tablespoons is a moistening, not a sauce.
- Pounded maceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold then in dried blades and pounded in a mortar. Ground mace from a jar is the same thing; use a good pinch.
- OystersA dozen shucked oysters, drained, tucked between the fish layers. They need no pre-cooking, though half an hour under pastry is a long bake for them and they may firm up.
- The cold fishReheated cooked fish should be brought properly hot through, not merely warmed. Flake it in generous pieces and keep it well chilled until it goes into the dish.
- YieldFour servings, as the recipe states, from 1 lb of cold fish. It is rich rather than large, and wants a plain green vegetable or boiled potatoes alongside.
Beeton's book is full of recipes that begin with something already cooked, and this is one of them: the cost is reckoned "exclusive of the cold fish" because the fish is assumed to be Monday's remains of Sunday's boiled cod. The oysters are the tell of the period. Through most of the nineteenth century oysters were cheap London food, sold by the barrel and used as a bulking and seasoning ingredient in pies, sauces and stuffings rather than treated as a luxury; the collapse of the native beds later in the century reversed that entirely. Mace, meanwhile, was the standard warm spice for fish and white sauces in English cookery, where a modern cook would more likely reach for nutmeg or nothing at all. The whole construction, cheap protein extended with pastry and finished with a flour-thickened cream, is characteristic of the household economy the book was written to teach.