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Hilaire Hiler's Fish Pie
Any sort of boiled fish may be used after skin and bones have been removed. Butter pudding dish, put in a layer of fish, then a layer of tomatoes (well seasoned with pepper and salt) Continue alternating fish and tomato layers until dish is 3/4 full. Pour over 1 cup melted butter. Fill dish to top with mashed potatoes. Brush top with melted butter. Bake in hot oven 1/2 hour. Serve in baking dish.
A leftover-fish gratin of the plainest kind, and it stands or falls on how wet the layers are. Everything else is assembly.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as 425-450F. Thirty minutes at that heat browns the potato crust and heats the filling through; nothing in the dish is raw, so the bake is for colour and bubbling, not cooking.
- The butter is excessiveA full cup of melted butter poured over the layers will pool and run out when you cut it. Two to four tablespoons, dotted between layers, does the same job. Keep a spoonful back for brushing the top.
- Drain the tomatoesFresh tomatoes sliced straight in, or canned tomatoes with their juice, will flood the dish and leave the potato sitting on soup. Slice and salt fresh tomatoes and let them drain twenty minutes, or use canned tomatoes drained hard and chopped.
- Pudding dishA period pudding dish is a deep ovenproof dish, often earthenware and as often oval with sloping sides as straight, in the region of 1.5 to 2 quarts. Any deep casserole or souffle dish of that size works, and since it goes to the table it may as well be one you like.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish, flaked in large pieces: cod, haddock, pollock, halibut. Cooked salmon works too. Avoid anything already sauced, and check twice for pin bones, since the recipe assumes you have removed them all.
- Season the fish as wellThe original seasons only the tomato layers. Boiled fish is bland; salt and pepper the flakes too, and a little lemon zest or chopped parsley between the layers is in keeping.
- Mashed potato toppingUse stiff mash rather than loose creamy potato, or it will sink into the filling. Roughing the surface with a fork before buttering gives you the browned ridges that make the dish worth looking at.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A 2-quart dish built this way serves four as a main course; reckon on roughly a pound of cooked fish and enough potato for about two cups of mash.