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Lobster and Other Sea Fish (R chauff of Fish No)
Réchauffé of Fish, No. 2.
INGREDIENTS.
1 pint of cooked fish, flaked 1 teaspoonful of anchovy and seasoned. ¼ a cup of butter. ¼ a cup of flour.
1 cup of fish stock.
1 cup of cream and milk combined. ½ a teaspoonful of salt, if needed. paste. ½ a teaspoonful of paprica. 2 tablespoonfuls of oil. 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon juice.
1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley.
Method. - Marinate the fish while hot with salt, pepper, oil and lemon juice, adding, also, a few drops of onion juice, if desired. At serving-time make a sauce of the butter, flour, salt, paprica, stock and cream; add the paste and the fish, and, when the fish is thoroughly heated, turn down the flame of the lamp or set the blazer into hot water.
Sprinkle with the parsley and serve.
Sardines on Toast.
Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter in the blazer; add two tablespoonfuls of flour and a dash of paprica, and stir until smooth and browned a little; then add half a cup of stock and half a cup of sherry; stir until thickened, then let simmer a few minutes, and add nearly a cup of sardines, from which the bones and skin have been removed and the flesh separated into small pieces. Let stand until very hot.
Two chafing-dish preparations for cooked fish, printed with the ingredient list badly scrambled by the original typesetting. The sense is recoverable, and the technique is a straightforward velouté enriched with cream.
- Reading the ingredient listThe column has collapsed: "1 teaspoonful of anchovy" and the stray word "paste" at the end belong together as one teaspoon of anchovy paste. The fractions printed "14 a cup" and "1½ a teaspoonful" are broken renderings of ¼ cup and ½ teaspoon.
- RéchaufféFrench for "reheated" — a dish built from yesterday's cooked fish rather than a way of cooking raw fish. Any firm white fish, salmon or leftover poached halibut works; a pint of flakes is roughly 10 to 12 oz.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Its hot-water bath is the lower pan. A wide skillet plus a bain-marie of simmering water reproduces both stages.
- The hinge: heat, do not boilOnce cream and flaked fish go in, the mixture must only come up to serving heat. Boiling shreds the flakes and can break the sauce, which is exactly why the author tells you to turn the flame down or drop the blazer into hot water.
- Sauce proportions¼ cup butter and ¼ cup flour to 2 cups of liquid gives a thick, spoon-coating sauce. If you want it looser for spooning over toast, hold back a little flour rather than adding liquid at the end.
- Marinate while hotDressing the fish with oil and lemon while it is still warm is the point of the step — warm flakes absorb the acid and oil, cold ones just sit in it. Do this ahead, then refrigerate until serving time.
- Paprica and anchovyPaprica is paprika; sweet Hungarian is the likelier intention here rather than smoked. The anchovy paste carries much of the seasoning, so it is worth judging the salt against it — the ingredient list itself says "if needed."
- Fish stockA cup of light fish fumet, or the strained poaching liquid from the fish itself. Bottled clam juice diluted by half is a workable substitute; chicken stock will flatten the dish.
- Sardines on ToastThe second recipe is self-contained: a lightly browned roux with ½ cup stock and ½ cup sherry, then boned sardines folded in. Half the liquid being sherry is assertive by modern taste; the few minutes' simmering directed takes the raw edge off it, though it will not drive the alcohol out.
Chafing-dish cookery had a real vogue in American households around the turn of the twentieth century, when the spirit lamp let a hostess assemble a hot supper at the table without a servant or a kitchen trip — hence the run of "dainties" in this section, all of them quick, saucy and made from things already cooked. A réchauffé was not an apology in this period but a recognized category: cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s devote whole chapters to the respectable reuse of cooked fish and meat, a thrift that sat easily beside cream, sherry and anchovy paste. Tinned sardines, cheap and shelf-stable after the Breton and later Maine canneries scaled up in the nineteenth century, were a chafing-dish staple for the same reason: no cooking required, only heating in something rich.