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Breakfast Dish of Fish
122. Take any white fish that has been dressed, break it up small, put it in a stewpan with a large lump of butter, add a large breakfast cup full of boiled rice, a little cream, four hard boiled eggs, minced, a little cayenne and salt; mix all well together, make it quite hot, pile it in a dish, and send it to table.
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This is kedgeree in its Victorian English form, built from leftover cooked fish rather than fresh. It comes together in about ten minutes once the rice and eggs are ready.
- The hingeEverything goes into the pan already cooked; the stewpan only reheats and binds. Stir gently and stop as soon as it is hot through, or the fish shreds to paste and the eggs turn granular.
- "Dressed" fishMeans fish already cooked, most often the remains of a boiled or baked white fish. Cod, haddock, hake or pollock all work; about 12 oz of flaked cooked fish suits the quantities here. Smoked haddock, the modern default for kedgeree, was not specified but is a fair substitute.
- A large breakfast cup of riceA breakfast cup is generous, roughly 10 to 12 fl oz, so about 1 1/2 cups of cooked rice. That is the yield of a scant 1/2 cup of raw long-grain rice.
- A large lump of butterRead as 2 to 3 tablespoons. The dish is meant to be rich and loose, not greasy; add the cream a spoonful at a time until it just coheres.
- StewpanA wide, shallow saucepan with a lid. A modern sauté pan or straight-sided skillet gives the surface area needed to warm the mixture without stirring it to mush.
- CayenneCayenne was a common seasoning in breakfast fish dishes of the period; a scant 1/4 teaspoon is enough for this volume. Season the salt to taste at the end, since the cooked fish and the butter may already carry salt.
- YieldServes three to four as a breakfast or light supper dish. It does not hold well, so pile and serve at once.
This is the English breakfast kedgeree, descended from the Indian rice-and-pulse dish khichri and reshaped by returning Anglo-Indian households into something made of rice, fish, butter and hard-boiled egg. The transformation is usually traced to the nineteenth century, when British families in India and at home began treating the dish as a way to use up cooked fish at breakfast, the meal at which Victorian households expected hot dishes on the sideboard. What is striking in this version is that no curry powder or turmeric appears at all, only cayenne: the Indian ancestry has been reduced to a single note of heat. The reliance on "any white fish that has been dressed" also marks it as a leftovers recipe, part of the large body of Victorian instructions for making yesterday's dinner into today's breakfast.