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Fish
When there remains any cold fish, take away all skin and bones, mixing the flesh with salt, butter, pepper, and one or two raw eggs as you wish. Take some small fireproof cases and place in each some lemon-juice with a little melted butter and grated breadcrumbs. Bake the cases till the top of the fish is of a golden color.
A leftover-fish gratin written in the telegraphic style of wartime household cookery: the fish mixture is never explicitly put into the cases, but that is plainly the intent. The eggs are the whole structure here, so treat them as a binder rather than an afterthought.
- Read the order of assemblyThe text puts lemon juice, melted butter and grated breadcrumbs into the case and never says where the fish goes. The likeliest reading is to line each case with the lemon juice and butter, spoon in the bound fish, and finish with the buttered crumbs on top, since otherwise there is nothing to brown "golden" -- but this is an inference, not an instruction in the original.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. 375-400F for 15-20 minutes sets the egg and colours the crumbs; a cooler oven leaves the top pale and the mixture weeping.
- Egg quantityOne egg binds roughly 8 oz of flaked fish. Two eggs to the same amount gives a softer, almost custardy result — which is what "as you wish" is offering.
- "Fireproof cases"Individual ramekins, cocottes or small ovenproof gratin dishes, about 4-6 oz each. Butter them; the fish sticks otherwise.
- Which fishAny cooked white fish, salmon or smoked haddock. Very oily fish and anything already heavily sauced will make the mixture greasy or slack.
- Salt with careCold cooked fish is usually already seasoned, and salted butter and smoked fish add more. Taste the raw mixture before the egg goes in if that troubles you, and season lightly.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind, and toss them with melted butter so they crisp rather than scorch.
- YieldEnough leftover fish for four small cases makes a light lunch or a first course. It does not reheat well a second time.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled during the First World War, its proceeds directed to Belgian relief, and its recipes were gathered from Belgian refugees and households whose kitchens had been reduced to whatever came to hand. That context explains the shape of this entry: it begins not with an ingredient list but with the phrase "when there remains any cold fish," the opening of a recette de restes. Dishes of this kind — flaked cooked fish bound with egg and butter, baked in small dishes under crumbs — sit at the modest end of the same family as the French coquille and the English fish pie. The instruction to season and bind "as you wish" leaves the proportions to the cook's own judgement.