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Cusk à La Crème
1 pint cold fish. 1 pint milk. 1 blade mace. 1 sprig parsley. 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch 1/2 tablespoon bu ter Yolk of 1 egg 1 bay leaf Put the milk with the mace, parsley and bay leaf in a double boiler; bring to a boil; remove the mace, parsley and bay leaf and add the cornstarch and butter, well rubbed together. Then add the beaten egg and season to taste. Fill a baking dish with alternate layers of fish and sauce; cover with bread crumbs and bake in the oven until the crumbs are browned.
The loose-leaf format has cost this page part of its ingredient list, so read it as a method rather than a formula. What survives is a thin egg-and-cornstarch cream sauce layered with cooked fish and baked under crumbs.
- The missing quantitiesMilk, mace, parsley and the fish itself all appear in the method but not in the surviving ingredient list. Nothing in the text indicates how much milk was meant; for a sauce built on 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch and 1/2 tablespoon butter, a cup is the plausible order of magnitude, but that is inference, not the original.
- CuskCusk (Brosme brosme) is a North Atlantic relative of cod and haddock, once a cheap market fish in New England and now rarely sold; it has been the subject of NOAA conservation concern. Any firm white fish -- cod, haddock, pollock, hake -- behaves the same way here.
- The fish goes in cookedThe method layers fish with sauce and bakes only until the crumbs brown, which is far too short to cook raw fillets through. Poach or steam the fish first and flake it; the wording "layers of fish" suggests already-cooked flesh.
- Tempering the eggThe double boiler is the whole point. Add the beaten yolk off direct heat and keep the sauce below a simmer, or it will scramble into threads rather than thicken.
- Rubbing the butter and cornstarch"Well rubbed together" means worked to a smooth paste (the same trick as a flour-and-butter beurre manié) and whisked into the hot milk in small pieces. Dropped in dry, the cornstarch will lump.
- MaceBlade mace, the outer covering of nutmeg, was steeped whole and lifted out. Ground mace works if you use a pinch and accept that it stays in the sauce; ground nutmeg is the nearest substitute.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or time. A hot oven, with both components already warm, will brown buttered crumbs in something like ten to fifteen minutes -- watch it rather than time it. Butter the crumbs or they will dry rather than colour.
"À la crème" simply signals a dish finished in a cream sauce, and this is a plain American version of it: milk thickened with cornstarch rather than a flour roux, enriched with a single yolk, and scented by steeping mace, parsley and bay rather than by any stock. If the page did sit under a "Meat Substitutes" heading, that is of a piece with early twentieth-century American household cookery, where such headings could serve households keeping Friday and Lenten abstinence as well as thrift-minded cooks; meatless days were also promoted as patriotic economy during the First World War. Cusk suited such a heading: a groundfishery fish, firm-fleshed, generally cheaper than cod, and easily stretched by layering flaked flesh with sauce and crumbs.