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Creamed Fish, or Fish Timbale
One and one-half pound of any delicate fish, such as halibut, white-fish, cusk or salmon, will prove ample for six persons. Remove the bones and skin, and pound the meat very fine so it may be rubbed through a soupstrainer. One-half teacup of mushrooms beaten with the fish before it is strained will greatly improve its flavor. Cook one-half pint of stale bread crumbs ten minutes in a pint of sweet cream, and add a scanty cup of butter, three scanty teaspoons of salt, a heaping saltspoon of pepper or paprika and a few gratings of nutmeg. When this mixture is cold, add the fish, beat the whole thoroughly, and then add four eggs, also well beaten, and place the mass in a nicely buttered form. Set the form in a deep baking-pan, place it in the oven, and pour in water until it reaches to within one inch of the top of the form. Cover the form with buttered paper, and cook for three-quarters of an hour, leaving the oven door slightly open. Hollandaise and tomato sauces are both fine served with a fish timbale.
A baked fish forcemeat set in a water bath — closer to a savory custard than a loaf. The texture depends entirely on gentle, even heat, so the water bath and a moderate oven do the real work.
- Oven and water bathThe original gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, suits it. Leaving the oven door slightly open may have served to keep the surrounding water below a boil in an unreliable range; with a modern thermostat, keep the door shut and simply check that the water is barely steaming rather than bubbling. Boiling water will curdle the custard and make the timbale grainy.
- The hinge: do not overcookThree-quarters of an hour is right for a deep mold, but judge by the center, which should be just set and read about 160F. Fish protein plus egg goes from silky to spongy quickly, and there is no recovering it.
- Pounding the fishA food processor does in moments what the mortar and soup strainer did at length. Pulse the raw fish with the mushrooms until smooth, then sieve if you want the very fine texture the original insists on; pin bones and connective tissue are part of the reason for straining.
- Archaic measuresA teacup is not a standard cup — read it as roughly 3/4 cup, which is genuinely approximate. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. "Scanty" means just under a level measure, "heaping" just over.
- Butter and saltA scanty cup of butter is close to half a pound for a pound and a half of fish, and three teaspoons of salt is a firm hand by current taste. Half the butter and about two teaspoons of salt will give a lighter result; season the cold panade before the eggs go in, since you cannot taste it afterward.
- Sweet creamFresh, unsoured heavy cream — "sweet" distinguished it from the soured cream that was common in a household that skimmed its own milk. No sugar is involved.
- CuskA North Atlantic relative of cod, once cheap and common on East Coast markets and now rarely sold. Halibut, haddock, hake or salmon all work; avoid oily fish like mackerel, which overwhelms the custard.
- Mold and paperA charlotte mold, small soufflé molds, buttered.
- YieldSix as a first course or light main, with hollandaise or a plain tomato sauce. It unmolds best after resting five to ten minutes out of the water bath.
The timbale takes its name from the French timbale, a drum-shaped cup, and by extension the mold and anything baked in it. Dishes of this kind descend from the elaborate forcemeat cookery of nineteenth-century French professional kitchens What the Butterick book does is domesticate that technique for a household cook without a brigade: one pound and a half of whatever delicate fish the market has, a soup strainer instead of a tammy cloth, and a hollandaise or tomato sauce poured over. The book itself came from the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and the Delineator magazine. Cusk in the ingredient list is a small period detail: an inexpensive Atlantic groundfish that has largely disappeared from retail counters since.