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Salt (Few grains cayenne eggs)
Few grains cayenne 2 eggs 2 tablespoons Sherry wine Melt the butter, add flour, and pour on slowly the cream. Add terrapin meat with bones cut in pieces, entrails cut smaller, liver separated in pieces, eggs of terrapin, and mushrooms. Season with salt and cayenne. Just before serving, add eggs slightly beaten and two tablespoons Sherry wine.
WAYS OF USING REMNANTS OF COOKED FISH Fish à la Crême 1¾ cups cold flaked fish Sprig of parsley (cod, haddock, halibut, or 1/2 slice onion cusk) Salt and pepper 1 cup White Sauce I ½ cup buttered cracker crumbs Bit of bay leaf Scald milk, for the making of White Sauce, with bay leaf, parsley, and onion. Cover the bottom of small buttered platter with one-half of the fish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and pour over one-half the sauce; repeat. Cover with crumbs, and bake in hot oven until crumbs are brown. Fish à la crême, baked in scallop shells, makes an attractive luncheon dish, or may be served for a fish course at dinner.
The usable recipe here is Fish à la Crême, a Victorian way of rescuing leftover boiled or baked white fish. It is essentially fish layered with béchamel and crumbs, baked only long enough to brown.
- White Sauce IFarmer's thinner white sauce is roughly equal quantities of butter and flour cooked together with 1 cup of scalded milk added slowly, seasoned with salt and pepper; check the proportions against the sauce chapter of your own edition. For a layered dish like this, a slightly stiffer sauce holds its place instead of flooding the platter.
- Scalding the milkHeat the milk with the bay leaf, parsley sprig and half onion to about 180F, just until it steams and shimmers at the edge, then let it stand a few minutes and strain before making the roux. This infusion is what keeps the dish from tasting of plain flour and milk.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as 425 to 450F. The fish is already cooked, so the bake is only to set the sauce and brown the crumbs, roughly 12 to 20 minutes depending on the depth of the dish.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCoarsely crushed soda or saltine crackers tossed with melted butter, about 1 tablespoon butter to ½ cup crumbs. Panko or dry breadcrumbs work but brown faster; check them at ten minutes.
- CuskCusk is a North Atlantic relative of the cod, still landed in New England but rarely at supermarket counters. Any firm cooked white fish substitutes: cod, haddock, halibut, pollock or hake, flaked and picked over for bones.
- Quantities to judge by eyeThe fish measure and the crumb measure are both printed unclearly in this edition. Roughly 1¾ cups flaked fish to 1 cup sauce is the correct proportion, and about ½ cup buttered crumbs is enough to cover a small platter; more than that turns the top dry.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; on the quantities here it should serve about two as a light main course, or four as a first course when baked in individual scallop shells or ramekins.
- On the terrapin fragmentThe lines at the head of this page belong to a terrapin stew. Diamondback terrapin is now protected or tightly regulated across its range and is not a food animal to be sourced; treat those lines as historical text only.
Dishes "à la crême" filled a real need in a household that cooked whole fish: a boiled cod or haddock left cold remnants, and Fannie Farmer devoted a full section of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book to using them up. The scallop-shell service mentioned at the end lent a plain creamed mixture enough presentation to appear at a luncheon or as a dinner fish course. The terrapin recipe that this page runs into belongs to the opposite end of the same book's range: terrapin stewed with its own eggs and finished with Sherry was one of the most expensive dishes in late nineteenth-century American cooking, and the appetite it created is a large part of why the animal became scarce.