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Fish Pudding
2 lbs. red snapper. 2 eggs. Grated onion to taste. 1 pt. white sauce. Cook fish until tender and well done in water with a little salt. After it is taken from the fire pull apart and take out all small bones. Mash well. To this add white sauce, onion and two eggs, beaten together very light. Grease border mold and put fish in. Steam this in pan of hot water for forty minutes and do not let water boil. Put inside the oven with oil paper on top. Serve with white sauce on platter of lettuce leaves. Garnish with potato roses and slices of lemon dipped in parsley. Fill center with potato balls. Salmon pudding can be made the same way, using canned salmon. It is pretty and delicious.
A moulded fish custard in the old style: poached fish bound with white sauce and egg, set gently in a water bath. The hinge is heat control — the water must never boil, or the eggs curdle and the pudding weeps.
- The water bathThe recipe says to steam in a pan of hot water and then to put it in the oven, which reads as a contradiction. The likeliest reading is that the mould sits in a pan of hot water and the whole thing goes into the oven, though the text could also be describing a stovetop steam followed by a spell in the oven. No temperature is given; a moderate oven, around 325F, with the water kept at a bare shiver and well under a simmer, suits the method.
- Oiled paper"Oil paper" here is paper brushed with oil to keep the top from drying and browning. Buttered parchment or a loose sheet of foil does the same job.
- White sauce, 1 pintTwo cups. About 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk gives a lightish sauce; go to 4 tablespoons each for a true medium bechamel. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Make a second batch for serving, since the recipe calls for sauce both in the pudding and on the platter.
- Cooking the fish firstTwo pounds of snapper poached until it flakes gives roughly three cups of picked meat if the weight is whole fish; boneless fillet will give appreciably more. Slip it into salted water just off the boil and pull it as soon as it flakes; fish boiled hard turns fibrous and the pudding goes dry no matter how gently you bake it.
- Border mouldA ring mould, greased well and, if you want a clean turn-out, lined on the bottom with a circle of parchment. A 6-cup ring is about right for this quantity. Rest it five minutes before inverting.
- DonenessForty minutes is a fair estimate for a ring mould, but judge by feel: the pudding should be set to the centre and a knife should come out clean, around 160F internally. A deeper mould will want longer.
- The garnishesPotato roses are duchesse potato piped through a star tube and browned; potato balls are scooped with a melon baller and boiled or buttered. Lemon slices "dipped in parsley" means the cut edge pressed into finely minced parsley.
- Salmon versionTwo 14- to 15-oz cans of salmon, drained, with the skin and any hard or oversized bones removed. The soft round vertebrae mash in unnoticed and are worth keeping.
- YieldServes six as a light main course, four if it is the centre of the meal.
Mary A. Wilson wrote on cookery during and just after the First World War — she is often associated with the Ladies' Home Journal, though as often with newspaper food columns — and her books carry the marks of that period: fish and canned goods pressed into service where meat had been, and a great deal of attention paid to making an economical dish look worth sitting down to. Moulded fish puddings of this kind belong to a long European tradition — French cookery had its pain de poisson — in which cooked fish is bound with a panade or white sauce and eggs and set in a bath so the custard never breaks. The border mould with a filled centre was a standard company presentation of the era, and Wilson's closing line, "It is pretty and delicious," tells you which of the two she thought needed arguing for.