Scalloped Fish
Free from skin and bones, flake it, put in greased baking-dish or pan, pour over it a white sauce, then a second layer of fish, then sauce to moisten. Cover the top with greased bread crumbs (stale) and bake until the crumbs are brown.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a cookbook that assumed you already had cold boiled fish on hand. The gaps are all in the quantities, so here is what the original takes for granted.
- What "it" isThe recipe opens mid-thought because the fish is presumed to be already cooked — the remains of a boiled or baked fish from an earlier meal. Roughly 1 lb of flaked cooked fish and 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce fills a 1-quart dish and serves three or four.
- If you start from raw fishPoach or steam fillets first and flake them, or the dish will finish browning on top long before the interior is hot. Cod, haddock, hake, pollock and salmon all flake well; delicate sole collapses to paste.
- The white sauceA typical white sauce of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper, sometimes with a grating of nutmeg or a little lemon. Make it slightly looser than you think you want; the crumbs and fish drink it up in the oven.
- OvenThis is a browning job, not a cooking job — 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the top is a deep gold and the sauce bubbles at the edges. The original gives no temperature at all, only the instruction to bake until the crumbs are brown.
- Greased bread crumbsStale bread grated coarse and tossed with melted butter, about 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs, until every crumb is dulled with fat. Dry commercial crumbs are too fine and go sandy; torn stale bread pulsed once or twice in a processor is closer to the original.
- The hingeMoisten, do not flood. The instruction says "sauce to moisten" for the second layer rather than another full pouring, because too much sauce makes the whole thing soupy and the fish flavour disappears into milk.
- Seasoning the fish itselfLeftover boiled fish is bland and salt-poor. Season the flakes as you layer them, not just the sauce, or the dish tastes of white sauce alone.
Scalloped dishes — anything baked in a shallow dish under buttered crumbs — were the backbone of Anglo-American economy cookery, and fish was among their subjects because a boiled cod or salmon fed a family once and left enough for a second meal. The word is generally traced to the scallop shell, in which such mixtures are said to have originally been baked and served, long before ovenproof dishes made the shell optional. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried recipes like this one, and the compressed, almost telegraphic instructions here reflect a readership expected to know what a white sauce was without being told.