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Turban of Fish
2½ cups cold flaked fish (cod, haddock, halibut, or cusk) 1½ cups milk 1 slice onion Blade of mace Sprig of parsley ¼ cup butter 1/4 cup flour ⅔ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Lemon juice Yolks 2 eggs ½ cup buttered cracker crumbs Scald milk with onion, mace, and parsley; remove seasonings. Melt butter, add flour, salt, pepper, and gradually the milk; then add eggs, slightly beaten. Put a layer of fish on WAYS OF USING REMNANTS OF COOKED FISH buttered dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add a few drops of lemon juice. Cover with sauce, continuing until fish and sauce are used, shaping in pyramid form. Cover with crumbs, and bake in hot oven until crumbs are brown.
A leftover-fish dish built like a small pyramid: layers of flaked cooked fish and a mace-scented white sauce enriched with egg yolks, crumbed and browned. It comes together in about twenty minutes once the fish is cooked.
- QuantitiesThe fish measure reads as 2½ cups flaked cooked fish, and the butter as ¼ cup to match the ¼ cup flour for a medium white sauce. The salt figure is inconsistent with the pepper and should be read as about ½ teaspoon, adjusted to taste since the fish is already cooked and seasoned.
- Oven"Hot oven" in period usage corresponds to roughly 400-425F on a modern dial. The mixture is already cooked through, so you are only browning the crumbs and heating the centre: 15 to 20 minutes.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold whole as "blades" or ground. A blade is roughly ¼ to ½ teaspoon of ground mace; it goes into the milk and is removed before the sauce is built, as the recipe directs.
- The egg yolksAdd them off the heat, after the sauce has thickened, and beat a little hot sauce into them first. Dropped straight into a boiling sauce they curdle into threads.
- Scalding the milkBring it just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, then hold it off the heat with the onion, mace and parsley for five to ten minutes before straining. Boiling it hard gains nothing and gives a skin.
- Buttered crumbsCracker crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to half a cup of crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs will scorch in patches rather than browning evenly.
- The fishCod, haddock, halibut and cusk are all lean white fish that flake in large pieces; cusk is now uncommon in shops and pollock or hake stands in for it. Pick over the flakes for bones and skin, which cold cooked fish hides well.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a green vegetable, or six as a first course.
This belongs to a whole class of late-nineteenth-century dishes designed around "remnants of cooked fish" -- cooked fish reappearing under a sauce and a crumb crust. A turban in period cookery meant food built up or moulded into a rounded, coiled shape, from the headdress; French kitchens used the term for forcemeat rings baked in a border mould, and American writers borrowed it loosely for anything heaped into a dome, which is exactly what the instruction to shape "in pyramid form" produces. Infusing the milk with onion, mace and parsley is a common period treatment for a white sauce meant to accompany fish, and mace was valued for a warmth that does not read as sweet the way nutmeg does.