Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Remains of Fish
Remains of Fish
Make a good white sauce, add pepper, salt, and a little nutmeg and juice of a lemon. Add then your remains of fish and a few pickled shrimps. Fill some shells with it and sprinkle over the top a good powdering of grated Gruyere cheese. Lay a pat of butter in the middle of each shell and put them in the oven. When they are colored a good golden brown, serve them decorated with parsley.
A leftover-fish gratin of the kind every Belgian household kept in reserve. The whole thing depends on the fish being already cooked and only reheated briefly under strong top heat, so it browns before it dries out.
- The hinge: heat fast, not longThe fish is cooked already. Set the oven to 425F, or use the broiler, and pull the shells the moment the cheese is golden — five to eight minutes. A long bake at moderate heat turns flaked fish into cotton wool.
- "Shells"Scallop shells (coquilles) or small metal shell dishes, both in use for this kind of service in the period. Ramekins, gratin dishes or a single small baking dish all work; fill them no more than level with the rim so the surface can brown.
- A good white sauceAbout 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked out for a couple of minutes before the milk goes in. Keep it thick — pourable but not runny — or the filling will slump and weep in the oven. A little of the fish's poaching liquid or a splash of cream improves it.
- Pickled shrimpsIn this period these were small brown shrimp preserved in spiced vinegar or packed in butter. Cooked small shrimp with a squeeze of extra lemon stand in well; if you use potted shrimp in butter, cut back the butter elsewhere.
- Nutmeg and lemonBoth are seasoning, not flavor statements. A few scrapes of nutmeg and a teaspoon or two of juice for a cup of sauce — enough lemon to lift the fish without curdling the milk, so add it off the heat.
- GruyèreGrate it fine so it melts before the fish overheats. Any firm alpine cheese — Comté, Emmental, aged Gouda — does the same job. The pat of butter on top probably helps the cheese color evenly; a light brushing is enough with a modern oven.
- Which fishFirm white fish and salmon flake well; oily fish like mackerel can go bitter reheated under cheese. Pick over the flakes for bones and skin, and use fish that has been refrigerated no more than a day or two.
- YieldThe quantities above with roughly 8 oz of cooked fish fill four scallop shells, enough for four as a first course or two as a light supper with bread and salad.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915, when Britain was housing a refugee population usually put at around a quarter of a million, driven out by the German invasion, and its recipes were gathered from those exiled households — the proceeds said to have gone to Belgian relief. That origin shows plainly here: a dish built to use up what was already cooked, dressed with a little cheese and parsley so it arrives at the table looking deliberate rather than salvaged. Serving fish in scallop shells, en coquille, was a widespread continental habit of the period. The pickled shrimp point to the North Sea coast, where tiny brown shrimp were landed in quantity and preserved in vinegar or butter to carry inland — a cheap seasoning that gave a thrifty dish some backbone.