Scalloped Fish
Cold cooked fish makes a very attractive dish when prepared by the following recipe: one pint of fish; one pint of milk; two tablespoons of cornstarch; one-half cup of mashed potatoes; two hard boiled eggs; one tablespoon of butter; one cup of bread crumbs; salt and pepper to taste. Wet the cornstarch in one-half a cup of the milk, scald the balance of the milk, and add the cornstarch, and also the salt, pepper and butter, and cook until smooth and thickened. Rub the yolks of the eggs smooth, and add them to the sauce, and then the whites after they have been passed through a sieve. Flake the fish, add the potatoes, and season with salt and pepper. Grease a puddingdish, put in a layer of the fish mixture, cover with sauce, add another layer of fish, then more sauce, and so on until all is used. Cover the top with the bread crumbs, strew with fragments of butter, and bake for fifteen minutes in a quick oven.
FILLETS OF FLOUNDER (au Gratin)-Five pounds of fish before cutting. Fillet and cut into pieces four inches long by three wide. Spread two tablespoons of soft butter over a baking or gratin dish and lay the fillets in it. Sprinkle salt and pepper over them and set in a cool place until needed. Now make a sauce thus: Rub together one tablespoon of flour and three of butter; add a slice of onion, one bay leaf, one pint of chicken stock, and salt and pepper as needed. Simmer gently twenty minutes and then add one tablespoon of lemon juice, strain the sauce and pour over the fish. Season lightly with salt and pepper, and sprinkle one teacup of fine dried bread crumbs over the sauce and fish. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven and serve at once in the same dish. FILLETED SOLES-A large sole will make four fillets. Roll each fillet up, dip in egg, then in crumbs and fry in boiling lard. Or, gently simmer half of the fillets in salted water from six to ten minutes and then serve with the fried ones on the center of the dish with the boiled ones and a white sauce all round them. C
Three related dishes run together here: a scalloped bake built on cold cooked fish, flounder fillets au gratin, and filleted soles two ways. The measures are late-Victorian household ones and the ovens are described by feel rather than number.
- A pint of fishVolume, not weight: two cups of flaked cooked fish, which is roughly 12 oz of cooked flesh, or about a pound of raw fillet. Any firm white fish, salmon or leftover poached cod works.
- Oven temperaturesPeriod tables reckon a "quick oven" at roughly 400-450F, and the "hot oven" for the flounder is much the same. Fifteen minutes at that heat browns the crumbs and heats the assembled dish through, which is all it needs to do since the fish is already cooked.
- Reheating cooked fishThe scallop's only real job is to bring the centre to 165°F. If the fish and sauce go in refrigerator-cold, fifteen minutes will brown the top before the middle is hot; let the components come to room temperature or add five minutes and check the centre.
- The sauce is a cornstarch béchamelTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a sauce that pours but sets on standing. Slake the starch in cold milk, then temper it into the scalded milk off the heat and cook a full two minutes to lose the raw starch taste.
- Sieved eggRubbing the yolks into the hot sauce enriches and slightly thickens it; the whites are pushed through a sieve so they disperse as fine flecks rather than rubbery chunks. A box grater does the same job faster.
- Pudding-dish and teacupA pudding dish is a deep ovenproof baking dish, roughly a 1½–2 quart casserole. The "teacup" of crumbs in the flounder recipe is about ¾ cup, not a modern 8 oz measuring cup.
- The gratin roux is deliberately looseThe gratin roux is very loose -- One tablespoon flour to three of butter will not thicken a pint of stock into anything but a rich, barely-bound liquid, which the twenty-minute simmer reduces somewhat. If you want it to cling, use equal parts flour and butter.
- Frying the rolled fillets"Boiling lard" means fat at about 375°F. Secure each roll with a toothpick before crumbing or it will unwind in the fat.
- YieldThe scalloped fish will serve about four as a main course. Five pounds of flounder before filleting yields roughly two pounds of fillet.
Scalloped anything was the standard nineteenth-century answer to the cold remains of a boiled or baked fish: flake it, bind it with a white sauce, cap it with buttered crumbs and send it back to the oven. The name is usually traced to the scallop shells such mixtures were baked and served in, though the word has also been tangled with "collop"/"escalope", a thin slice; individual portions served in shells were called coquilles in more formal kitchens. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and magazine house before it was a cookbook publisher, and its domestic titles were aimed at the middle-class housekeeper who was expected to run a table on a budget without appearing to -- hence the opening line's insistence that leftovers make "a very attractive dish." The flounder and sole recipes that follow show the other half of that ambition: the same section teaches you to stretch yesterday's fish and to serve fillets au gratin in the dish they were baked in.