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To Warm Up Fish the Second Day
119. Salmon may be put into boiling water, and just heated through, taking care to add vinegar as at first. Turbot, brill, and codfish are best picked from the bones, and warmed up with cream or white sauce; then mash some potatoes, and form a wall round a dish (which may or may not be egged and browned), in which the fish is to be placed and served.
A Victorian method for the second day's fish, built on two ideas: oily fish is simply reheated in its original acidulated liquor, while white fish is flaked, bound with sauce and served inside a piped potato border.
- The hinge: heat briefly, onceCooked fish is already set; anything more than warming through turns salmon dry and flaked cod to cotton. Two to three minutes in barely simmering water for salmon, and no more than a gentle heating of the sauced fish for the rest.
- "Vinegar as at first"Victorian recipes for boiled salmon commonly sharpened the salted poaching water with vinegar, and the reheating water should match whatever was used at first; a spoonful of vinegar and salt to the pan is enough. Unsalted plain water draws flavour out of the fish.
- Storage before you startThe recipe assumes fish kept in a cool larder overnight. Refrigerate cooked fish promptly, use it within two days, and bring the sauced dish to a full steaming heat rather than the lukewarm "just heated through" of the original.
- Turbot and brillBoth are firm European flatfish and expensive where they are sold at all. Halibut, cooked cod, haddock or hake flake the same way and behave identically in sauce.
- White sauceHere this means a plain milk-based sauce -- roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg or mace. Keep it slack; it stiffens as it cools around the fish.
- The potato wallPlain mashed potato, beaten smooth with butter, spooned or piped into a raised rim around the dish; the recipe leaves egging and browning optional. If you do glaze it, brush with beaten egg and brown it under a hot grill or in a hot oven, which sets the rim firm and helps keep the sauce contained.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given because the dish is sized to whatever is left over. Reckon on about 4 to 5 oz of picked fish and a large potato per person; a pound of flaked fish with a cup of sauce fills a dish for three or four.
Reheating yesterday's fish was a routine problem in a period when a large turbot or a whole salmon was bought for a single dinner and the family ate the remainder. English cookery books of the mid-nineteenth century devote whole chapters to "remains" or "réchauffés", and the potato border seen here is a standard dressing-up device: the same trick that turns leftover mutton into a shepherd's pie or minced beef into a bordered hash. Turbot and brill head the list of white fish here, and both were prestige fish on Victorian London tables, sold at Billingsgate at prices that made waste unwelcome. The instruction to add vinegar reflects the older English habit of boiling salmon in an acidulated, salted liquor, and it is still worth following.