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Boston Scalloped Fish
2½ cups cold flaked haddock or halibut 1½ cups white sauce 1 cup cracker-crumbs, buttered teaspoonful pepper teaspoonful salt No. I (see page 1 tablespoonful butter 67), or drawn butter sauce (p. 70) Put one-half of the fish in the bottom of a wellbuttered baking - dish, add seasoning and small bits of butter. Cover with cracker - crumbs and pour over half of the sauce. Repeat and cover the top with a few crumbs, and brown in hot oven.
A straightforward reheating dish that depends entirely on the sauce being loose enough to keep the flaked fish moist. The text has come through with some measurements broken up, so read the ingredient list as a guide rather than a fixed formula.
- The garbled amountsThe original lines for pepper and salt appear to have lost their fractions in printing; as printed the page simply reads "teaspoonful pepper" and "teaspoonful salt," and there is no way to recover the intended fractions from this text. Season the fish by taste instead, remembering that cold cooked fish and buttered crumbs both mute salt.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in books of this period corresponds roughly to 400-450F. The fish and sauce are already cooked, so the oven is only there to heat the dish through and colour the crumbs — 15 to 20 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges.
- White sauce No. 1The cross-reference is to a graded white sauce on page 67, not reproduced here; in books of this era the lower-numbered sauce is generally the thinner one, on the order of a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk. Anything much thicker will set into a paste around the flakes as it bakes.
- Drawn butter sauceThe alternative given (p. 70) is butter thickened with a little flour and hot water or fish stock rather than milk.
- Cracker-crumbsThese mean crushed plain soda or common crackers, not sweetened graham or modern saltines alone. Toss the crumbs with melted butter before layering; "buttered crumbs" is a step, not a description.
- Flaking the fishPick over the cold fish for bones and skin and break it into large flakes rather than shredding it. Overworked fish turns to mush once sauce and heat are added.
- YieldThe layered quantities come to well over a quart, so use a shallow dish of about 1½ quarts; it serves four as a main course, six as a first course or supper dish with bread.
Scalloped dishes — anything layered with buttered crumbs and a sauce and browned in the oven — were the standard nineteenth-century American answer to cooked food left from an earlier meal. The name is usually traced to the scallop shells in which such mixtures were once baked and served, long after the actual shells gave way to gratin dishes. Recipes like this one belong to a period when domestic-science writers were arguing that thrift was a skill rather than an embarrassment: rather than disguising yesterday's fish, the method reheats it gently inside a sauce that protects it, which is still the soundest thing to do with cold cooked white fish.