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Serve (With toast or Puff Paste)
with toast or Puff Paste Points.
Fish à la Provençale 1/4 cup butter 2½ tablespoons flour 2 cups milk Yolks 4 "hard-boiled" eggs 1 teaspoon Anchovy sauce 2 cups cold boiled flaked fish Make a sauce of butter, flour, and milk. Mash yolks of eggs and mix with Anchovy essence, add to sauce, then add fish. Serve as soon as heated. Serve on pieces of toasted Graham bread.
A chafing-dish creamed fish, thickened twice over — once with flour, once with hard-cooked egg yolk. The text runs on from the previous entry, so the opening words "with toast or Puff Paste Points" belong to the recipe before it; this dish begins at "Fish à la Provençale."
- The hinge: reheat, don't cookThe fish is already cooked, so it goes in only to warm through — "serve as soon as heated" is the whole instruction. Held over the flame it shreds to cotton and the sauce breaks.
- Sauce proportions1/4 cup butter and 2 1/2 tablespoons flour to 2 cups milk gives a fairly thin white sauce, with less flour per cup of milk than a modern medium bechamel and more butter than flour. Cook the flour and butter a minute before the milk goes in, and add the milk gradually.
- Anchovy sauce or essenceThe list says sauce, the method says essence — they were different bottled goods, essence being the more concentrated. Use about 1 teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed oil-packed fillets, and taste before adding more.
- Egg yolks"Hard-boiled" appears in quotation marks; cookbooks of the period that punctuate it this way generally mean eggs cooked gently below the boil rather than at a rolling one. Sieve the yolks rather than mashing with a fork; lumps of yolk will not smooth out in the sauce.
- The fishAny firm cooked white fish — cod, haddock, halibut — flaked into pieces about the size of a thumbnail. Two cups is roughly 3/4 lb of cooked flesh, or about 1 lb raw.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified; the anchovy sauce is the only seasoning listed. Season the sauce before the fish goes in, then check again, as anchovy varies widely in salt.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf, denser and slightly sweet, named for the wholemeal flour Sylvester Graham promoted. Ordinary whole-wheat toast, cut thick and toasted dry, is the nearest substitute.
- YieldServes four as a light supper or luncheon dish, two if it is the main course.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households in the 1890s and early 1900s: a spirit lamp and a pan meant a hot dish could be made at the table in a flat without a kitchen fire, or after the theatre when the cook had gone to bed. Recipes of this type lean heavily on things already cooked, or on tinned and bottled goods, because the chafing dish is a poor tool for anything needing sustained heat. Nineteenth-century English and American kitchens used bottled anchovy essence much as later cooks used Worcestershire sauce, as a general savoury sharpener. The egg-yolk thickening is older still, a survival of the pre-roux practice of binding sauces with sieved yolk.