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Fish and Custard
Boil up the trimmings of your fish with milk, pepper and salt. Strain it and add the yolks of eggs till you get a good custard. Pour the custard into a mold, and lay in it your fish, which must already be parboiled. If you have cold fish, flake it, and mix it with the custard. Put the mold in a double saucepan. Steam it for three quarters of an hour. Turn it out, and garnish with strips of lemon peel, and if you have it, sprigs of fennel.
A savoury steamed fish custard, essentially a fish-stock royale unmoulded like a mousse. The recipe assumes you know how a custard behaves, and gives no quantities at all, so the ratios below are the useful part.
- The hinge: gentle heatA savoury custard sets at about 175-180F and curdles above that. Keep the water in the outer pan at a bare shiver, never a rolling boil, or the mould will weep liquid and turn grainy.
- "Trimmings"Heads, frames, skin and fins from a white fish — sole, plaice, whiting, cod. Simmer them in milk 15-20 minutes; long simmering of fish bones is generally held to muddy the flavour. Strain through a fine sieve or muslin.
- Egg ratio"Yolks till you get a good custard" is genuinely open. A workable proportion is 5 to 6 yolks per pint (about 570 ml) of strained fish milk; whole eggs give a firmer, more sliceable set if you want to unmould cleanly.
- "Double saucepan"A double boiler, or improvise a bain-marie: the mould stands in a roasting tin of hot water. Butter the mould well and cover it with foil or a buttered paper so condensation does not pit the surface.
- TimingThree quarters of an hour would suit a mould of roughly a pint and a half; the recipe gives no size. Smaller ramekins set in 20-25 minutes. It is done when a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean and the middle is just firm to the touch.
- Parboiled fishBarely poached, not cooked through — 2 to 3 minutes for fillets, since they finish in the custard. The original also allows cold cooked fish, flaked into the mixture, as an alternative.
- UnmouldingLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat before turning out; straight from the pan it is too fragile. Run a thin knife round the rim first.
- Yield and servingAs a rough guide, a pint of custard base with about 12 oz of flaked fish would serve four as a light main course. Good warm rather than hot, with brown bread, or with a thin butter sauce.
- GarnishFennel here means the feathery fronds of the herb or bulb, not seed. The lemon peel is pared zest cut in strips, with no white pith.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and the whole collection carries the marks of that moment: milk, eggs and scraps do a great deal of work, and nothing is thrown away. This dish is a domestic cousin of the classic royale, the savoury custard French and Belgian cooks set in moulds to garnish clear soups, here scaled up into a dish in its own right and built on stock made from bones and skin that would otherwise go in the bin.