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Casserole of Fish and Rice
2 Minced Cooked Fish 1/4 Teaspoon Pepper Salt 1 Tablespoon Parsley 1/4 Teaspoon Scraped Onion 1 Egg 1/4 Cup Crumbs Stock to Moisten 4 Cups Cooked Rice 1109 115 Line buttered dish with cooked rice, put fish mixture in center, and cover with rice. Steam 40 minutes. Serve with tomato sauce it 3 Egg Yolks 3 Tablespoons Hot Water 1/4 Teaspoonful Salt Dash of Pepper 1/2 Cupful Cooked Cereals 3 Egg Whites 1 Cupful Left-over Fish in White Sauce Beat egg yolks until thick and lemon colored; add hot water and seasoning; then fold in the stiffly beaten whites.
Pour mixture into a hot, greased skillet or omelet pan and cook slowly until lightly browned underneath, turning the skillet around frequently, that it may brown evenly. Set in the oven to finish cooking the top. It is done when rather firm to a light pressure of the finger.
With a sharp knife make a two-inch cut across each side. Remove to a hot platter; on one-half spread the mixture of cooked cereal and fish, well seasoned; fold over the omelet at the cut edges and serve at once. A creamed fish sauce may be poured over the entire omelet if preferred.
Two separate dishes have been run together here by the scanner: a steamed rice-and-fish mould served with tomato sauce, and a puffy omelet filled with leftover fish. The stray "1109 115" is page or index numbering, not an ingredient.
- The missing measureThe unit has dropped out of "2 Minced Cooked Fish". Two cups of minced cooked fish would suit the 4 cups of cooked rice, but the original supplies no unit and the quantity is a guess.
- Scraped onionAn old technique for onion flavour without texture: cut a flat face on a peeled onion and scrape it with the edge of a spoon or knife to release juice and pulp. A quarter teaspoon is a trace amount, meant to season rather than announce itself.
- Stock to moistenAdd fish or light chicken stock a spoonful at a time until the minced fish just holds together when pressed. Too much and the centre will weep into the rice wall during steaming.
- What "casserole" means hereThe rice lining forms a case around the filling. The recipe specifies only a buttered dish: use a buttered pudding basin or straight-sided baking dish, pack the rice firmly against the sides, and unmould it after steaming if you want the shape to show.
- Steaming itCover the dish tightly with buttered paper or foil and set it on a rack in a covered pan with an inch or two of simmering water, or use a steamer insert. Forty minutes is for heating through and setting the egg binder; the fish is already cooked, so longer only dries it.
- Cooked cereals in the omeletThis means leftover cooked oatmeal, farina or cream of wheat, used as a thickener and stretcher for the fish. Cooked rice or a stiff white sauce does the same job if you have no breakfast porridge to hand.
- Finishing the omeletThe recipe gives no oven heat, only "set in the oven"; a moderate oven for a few minutes is enough, or the puff collapses. The two-inch cuts across each side appear to be there so the aerated omelet folds without cracking apart.
- YieldNeither recipe states a yield. The rice mould would serve roughly four to six as a light main course; the three-egg omelet, two.
Both dishes belong to the same household economy: they exist to use up cooked fish. Cookbooks of this period assumed a cold larder and a moral objection to waste, and the standard answer was to bind leftovers with egg and crumbs and re-present them in a new shape — a rice-lined mould, a croquette, a fold of omelet. Steaming a lined mould rather than baking it was the older method. The puffy or "souffléed" omelet, with the whites beaten separately and the pan finished in the oven, is generally traced to the American cooking-school tradition, and the instruction to test for doneness with a light finger pressure is the sort of tactile cue those schools drilled into students who had no thermometer.