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Cayenne (1 cup white sauce No I see)
1 cup white sauce No.: I (see page 67) 2 tablespoonfuls butter Salt and white pepper Flake fish, add potato, and beat as for mashed potatoes, adding butter, salt, and white pepper.
Mix with white sauce seasoned with a dash of cayenne, put into a buttered porcelain dish, dot with bits of butter and bake until brown.
A gratin of cooked fish bound with mashed potato and white sauce, of the kind built to use up yesterday's boiled cod or haddock. The ingredient list as printed gives only the sauce, butter and seasoning, so the fish and potato quantities have to be judged by eye.
- ProportionsThe original does not state how much fish or potato to use. Equal volumes work well: about 2 cups flaked cooked fish to 2 cups hot mashed potato, bound with the 1 cup of white sauce. More potato makes it stodgy, less makes it collapse.
- White sauce No. 1The cross-referenced sauce on page 67 is not reproduced here. Sauces of this name in period books are usually a thin-to-medium one, on the order of 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together with 1 cup milk and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season it before it meets the fish.
- Bone the fish firstFlaking cooked fish by hand rather than chopping it is the point of the word "flake" here, and it is the only chance you get to find pin bones. Once it is beaten into potato they are invisible.
- Do not overbeatThe original has you flake the fish, add the potato and beat the two together as for mashed potatoes. If you prefer a less pasty result, beat the potato and butter smooth first and fold the fish through at the end, but that is a departure from the printed method.
- Porcelain dishA shallow ovenproof gratin dish, buttered. Depth matters more than material: keep the mixture under about 2 inches so it heats through by the time the top colours.
- Oven and timeEverything in the dish is already cooked, so this is browning rather than baking. The recipe gives no heat or time, only 'bake until brown'; a hot oven of about 400F for 20 to 30 minutes until the surface is well coloured suits it, and a few minutes under the broiler will finish a pale top.
- CayenneA dash means a pinch. It is there to lift a bland mixture, not to register as heat, and white pepper is used alongside so the dish stays pale underneath its crust.
- YieldRoughly four servings as a main course with a green vegetable, six as a supper dish.
Fish-and-potato bakes of this sort were a staple of Anglo-American left-over cookery, using up a boiled cod or haddock cooked the day before. The binding white sauce, numbered and cross-referenced to a master recipe elsewhere in the book, is characteristic of early twentieth-century domestic-science writing, in which a small set of standard sauces was learned once and applied to whatever came out of the larder. The dish is a close relative of fish pie, differing mainly in that the potato is beaten into the fish rather than laid over it as a lid.