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Scalloped Fish
1 pint cold cooked fish Butter 1 pint cream sauce Bread crumbs Put the fish in a baking dish with the cream sauce. Cover with bread crumbs and bits of butter and bake until brown. • •
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century books: it assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce and how hot to run the oven. The proportions are sound, but everything else has to be supplied.
- The hinge: sauce consistencyEqual volumes of fish and sauce sounds generous, but the flakes drink it up and a thin sauce will break and weep in the oven. Make a medium white sauce — 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour per cup of milk — so it mounds on the spoon before it goes into the dish.
- "Cream sauce"In this period the term usually means a white sauce made with milk, not heavy cream. Season it properly: salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or onion, and a squeeze of lemon, since the recipe adds no seasoning at all.
- QuantitiesA pint of cooked fish is roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of flaked flesh, depending how loosely it is packed — about what you get from a pound or so of raw fillet or the remains of a poached whole fish. A pint of sauce is 2 cups.
- Oven and timeThe book gives none. Bake at 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are brown. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the aim is to heat through and colour the top, not to cook the fish a second time.
- The crumbsDry bread crumbs, not fresh, and toss them with the melted butter rather than dotting butter on top — the original's "bits of butter" leaves pale patches between the greasy ones. About ½ cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter covers a 1½-quart dish.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish works: cod, haddock, halibut, pollock. Pick over it for bones and skin, and keep the flakes large — stirring the fish into the sauce shreds it to paste.
- LeftoversThis was written to use up yesterday's cooked fish. Cooked fish should have been refrigerated promptly and used within a couple of days, and the finished dish wants to reach 165F in the centre.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a potato and a green vegetable; six if it follows soup.
Scalloping — sauced leftovers under a buttered crumb crust, baked until brown — was one of the great labour-saving formulas of the American household kitchen, applied indifferently to fish, oysters, chicken, potatoes and cabbage. The name is traditionally traced to the scallop shells in which such mixtures were once baked and served, long after real shells gave way to earthenware and enamelled dishes.